sroux has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Dears,
As many I use Perl as a swiss army knife, I may understand the code, write some but also copy and glue it together to make scripts used on a desktop (as utility) or server (file parsing, mapping etc.).
I would like to write an utility that reads a file (can be max 500mb) and output a result with unique values >> for each delimited field << (what I mean is not an doing an unique on the whole file content but field by field).
Looks like that hashes are a nice solution for this task but I never used hashes.
I found some scripts around:
#Create hash based on header
my %combined; open(my $input, "<", "flatfile.dat") or die ("Unable to open file"); my $line = <$input>; chomp ( $line ); my @headers = split("|", $line); while (<$input>) { chomp; my @row = split("|"); for my $header (@headers) { push( @{ $combined{$header} }, shift(@row) ); } }
Now how to get the unique value for each field and produce an output file. I had this piece of code used somewhere but I hardly can understand it:
#Remove duplicates my %seen = (); my @uniqueOutput = grep { ! $seen{ $_ }++ } @output; print $fh3 @uniqueOutput;
Thank you for any guidance you may provide.