A while ago I had submitted to the snippets section a, well, snippet, called Open Flat File. The idea is to provide an x/y mechanism of navigating through data of pseudo-CSV files. Last night, one of my co-workers had a few questions about hashes, flat files, chomp, and miscelanous debris so I decided to pull the snippet back up. While I was trying to explain what it did, and how one should always use strict and -w it struck me: dog, I'm so lame!

So, here is my second revision of Open Flat File, with a few minor changes allowing to run under -w and use strict; Although it works, I feel very uncomfortable looking at it the way it is, and would very much appreciate any ideas that other monks may have on it. Here we go:

sub OpenFF {

    my %hash;
    my ($file,$dlmt) = @_;
    $dlmt = "\t" if ! $_[1];
    
    open(READ,$file) or return(0);
    my @file = <READ>;
    chomp(@file);
    close(READ);
    
    my @headers = split($dlmt,shift(@file));
     
    foreach my $line (@file) {
        my $x = 0;
        my @columns = split($dlmt,$line);
        while ($x < scalar @headers) {
            $hash{$headers[$x++]}{$columns[0]} = $columns[$x];
        }    
    }
    return(%hash);
}
[download]

Having that said, please consider this sample file:

foo.txt
-------
ID    NAME1    NAME2    AGE
1    donald    duck    50
2    mickey    mouse    48
3    peter    pan    62
4    madre    theresa    108
5    banana    split    2
[download]

And this sample script:

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

my %foo = OpenFF('foo.txt')
    or die("Couldn't parse foo.txt, $!\n");

print "The keys are:\n";
print join("\t",keys %foo)."\n";

print "Row 3 is:\n";
foreach (qw'ID    NAME1    NAME2    AGE') {
    print "$foo{$_}{'3'}\t";
}

print "Column 'NAME2' is:\n";
foreach (1..5) {
    print "$foo{'NAME2'}{$_}\n";
}
[download]

...and the output would be:

The keys are:
NAME1    NAME2    ID    AGE
Row 3 is:
3    peter    pan    62    
Column 'NAME2' is:
duck
mouse
pan
theresa
split
[download]

It is my opinion that this could be vastly explored and improoved, but at this point I have reached a point where I can't go any further without suggestions from my fellow monks.

• What could make this better?
• OO approach?
• Less loops?
• /dev/null?

I thank you all in advance.

#!/home/bbq/bin/perl
# Trust no1!

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