Checking vars from flatfile 2

[JimJx]

Hi all,

Just had a project dumped in my lap and was wondering if anyone had any ideas on this....

Everything was going great, until I found out I needed to read in the flatfile, and any null fields need to be changed to None or something similar, then rewrite the file....

I really don't want to run through a bunch of if statements checking for a null value and changing it to None. I know there should be a way of doing it using a foreach, but am not sure how to get started on it.

Any ideas, suggestions, comments, etc greatly appreciated.
Jim

 

[teroy]

Hi Jim,
it would be helpful if you had some sample code, or a few lines from your flat file table

Cheers

troy

 

[PhoenixDown]

Like this:

open(FILE,&quot;<path/to.file&quot;);
@content = <FILE>;
close(FILE);

@variable = split(/\|/, $content);

The delimiter is: |

Each record will then be: $variable[NUMBER]

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Contact me for any programming help and whatnot. I'll try my best to help!

 

[JimJx]

Hi Troy and Calvin,

I read in the data like this:

open (DATA, &quot;< companies.txt&quot || die &quot;Can't open companies.txt!\n$!\n&quot;;
@list=<DATA>;
close (DATA);
chomp (@list);

foreach $list(@list) {
($company,$category,$logo,$street1,$street2,$city,$state,$zip,$desc1,$desc2,$desc3,$image1,$image2,$image3,$url,$contact,$length) = split(/\|/,$list);

#Do whatever with the data

}

Most of these variables will contain data, sometimes several lines. Some of the vars will contain nothing. I need to take the vars that are empty, and change them to some default value, such as 'None' for example, but am not quite sure about how to loop through each var and check it without doing a series of 17 'if' statements......

Thanks for the quick replies.
Jim

 

[tsdragon]

The easiest way is just to do a search-and-replace on the whole record for null fields (i.e two consecutive delimiters, or starting or ending character is a delimiter). This should do that:

open (DATA, &quot;< companies.txt&quot;) || die &quot;Can't open companies.txt!\n$!\n&quot;;
    @list=<DATA>;
close (DATA);
chomp (@list);

foreach $list(@list)  {
   $list =~ s/^\|/none|/;     # null first field
   $list =~ s/\|$/|none/;     # null last field
   $list =~ s/\|\|/|none|/g;  # null field
   #Do whatever with the data
}

Tracy Dryden
tracy@bydisn.com

http://www.bydisn.com

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[JimJx]

Excellent everyone!

Thanks for all of the replies, I love the way everyone jumps in with their nickels worth of advice here (Was 2 cents worth, but with inflation..... )

Once again, thanks all,
Jim

 

[toolkit]

Another way:

open( DATA, $data );
@vals = map { $_ || 'None' } split( /|/, <DATA>, -1);
chomp($vals[$#vals]);
close( DATA );

I'm not in front of UNIX at the moment, but I think this should work ;-) Cheers, Neil

 

[toolkit]

Now that I am in front of UNIX, my code is FULL of errors. Please ignore my code, and use Tracy's clean (and bug free) solution.
Cheers Neil