create CSV from an array

[mutasie]

Another newbie question:

From an array, how do I generate a CSV? I use a foreach loop, but it will add an extra "," after the last number, as the example below:


my @array = (1,2,3,4,5);

foreach my $num (@array){
print $num = $num . ",";
}

output:1,2,3,4,5,

How should I approach this? Thanks.

Allen

 

[Annihilannic]

Use join.

Annihilannic.

 

[stevexff]

Or alternatively use Text::CSV_XS

use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::CSV_XS;

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new();
my @array = (1,2,3,4,5);

$csv->combine(@array);
my $csvLine = $csv->string();
print $csvLine, "\n";

CSV files are more tricky than they first appear - using the module to parse, read, and write them takes out all of the pain, especially if your data has embedded commas, quotes, and apostrophes...





Steve

[small]"Every program can be reduced by one instruction, and every program has at least one bug. Therefore, any program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work." (Object:erlDesignPatterns)[/small]

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Both answers are relevant and valid.
In such a simple case I'd probably just use join:

print join(',', @array), "\n";

As Steve rightly points out though, if this code is likely to grow and you are planning to use more complicated data (that might, for example, contain quotes in the data) then you really should use a module to do the work for you.
Your original code worries me though as I suspect you are actually altering your original data in the @array.

The code:

$num = $num . ",";

assigns a new value to $num in each case. The scary thing is that "foreach" creates an alias to each element so by altering $num you would actually be altering each element of the array. If you needed to re-use it later in your code it would be completely corrupted.

HTH


Trojan.

 

[mutasie]

Ah... I didn't even think about that. Thank you so much for pointing that out.

I appreciate everyone's help on this!

Allen