Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

Trying to avoid nested split commands when parsing a file

Status
Not open for further replies.

scb1776

Programmer
Dec 29, 2006
31
US
Although I have worked with Perl before I have not done any significant programming in it. I currently have a problem which seems like it should have a more elegant solution that I can come up with, but I am not familiar enough with parsing data to know.

I have a data file which I receive from a third party of the format:
[{“a”:”24”,”b”:”2014-01-15”,”c”:”English”,”d”:”3Y”}, {“a”:”21”,”b”:”2014-01-12”,”c”:”English”,”d”:”5Y”}, {“a”:”12”,”b”:”2013-12-15”,”c”:”French”,”d”:”7Y”}, {“a”:”18”,”b”:”2014-01-15”,”c”:”German”,”d”:”15Y”}]

Where the entire file is a single line and I have absolutely no control over this format.

I need to end up with a two dimensional Hash where the first dimension is keyed from the value in the ‘d’ field and the other fields are key/value pairs.

For example for the first record for this data:
my $one = 24
my $two = 2014-01-15
my $three = English
my $four = 3Y

The final hash would look like
my %Data
$Data{$four}{‘a’} = $one;
$Data{$four}{‘b’} = $two;
$Data{$four}{‘c’} = $three;

I know I can use “split (‘}’, $_);” to break the line into related sections. I could then further split this on “,” and “:” and take substrings to remove quotes and braces, and then fill everything in; but it seems like there should be an easier, more direct method, or maybe that is just wishful thinking on my part.

Can anyone suggest an easier method of reading a line of this format into a structure, which if not the final one that I am looking for, would at least allow me to drop some of the splits and/or substring commands it looks like I am going to need? Or just confirm that yes, I really do need to do this with numerous nested split commands.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
These links look VERY helpful. Thank you.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top