Simple substitution question 2

[mstelmac]

Hell everyone. I am trying to parse a text file and remove all newline characters(\n) that are located within quotes. My data looks like this:

"id12345"<tab>"Fix code in sections:\n 1.2.7\n 1.2.8" \n
"id12346"<tab>"Fix code in sections:\n 1.2..5.4\n 1.2.3.2" \n
"id12347"<tab>"Fix code in sections:\n 1.g.8\n 1.y.r" \n

I don't want to remove the \n characters at the end of the record, I just want to remove all \n characters that are located inside the quotes. I thought I could just remove all \n characters and then put them back at the end of each record by doing this:

first command = s/\n/ /g;
second command = s/"id1/\n"id1/g;

But this method is ugly and depends on a match of the beginning of the record number. Isn't their a cleaner way to do it????????????????

Sorry guys but I'm really new to perl.

thanks,
Matt

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

while(<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  print "\n" if /^"id1/;
  print;
}
print "\n";
__DATA__
"id12345"<tab>"Fix code in sections:
1.2.7
1.2.8"
"id12346"<tab>"Fix code in sections:
1.2..5.4
1.2.3.2"
"id12347"<tab>"Fix code in sections:
1.g.8
1.y.r"

Trojan.

 

[PaulTEG]

while (<FILE>) {
  $_=s/\n//g;
  print FILE2 "$_\n";
}

HTH
--Paul

Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Paul, did you actually test that?


Trojan.

 

[mstelmac]

So it looks like there is no way to actually remove \n characters that are inside quotes?

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

What do you mean?
Does my code not do that for you?
Do you want the data in a file or in an array or something?
Tell us what you want and you might be lucky! ;-)


Trojan.

 

[mstelmac]

Trojan you code is great. This data is not in a file it is stored in a variable. See below:
############################################################
open OUTPUT, 'C:\Program Files\Rational\ClearQuest\Scripts\OSCAR\db_output.txt';

while ( <OUTPUT> )
{
$outfile = $outfile.$_;
}
close OUTPUT;

$outfile =~ s/\n/ /g;
$outfile =~ s/"id1/\n"id1/g;

$smtp->datasend("$outfile\n");
############################################################

My problem is that new line characters (\n) should only be in the file at the end of each record. However there are some newline characters in the middle of a record. I appologize for not being tech savy.

-matt

 

[TrojanWarBlade]

Try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $var = '"id12345"<tab>"Fix code in sections:
1.2.7
1.2.8"
"id12346"<tab>"Fix code in sections:
1.2..5.4
1.2.3.2"
"id12347"<tab>"Fix code in sections:
1.g.8
1.y.r"
';
$var =~ s/("[^\n]+)\n([^\n]+)\n([^"]+")/$1$2$3/g;
print $var;

Trojan.