jaffinito34 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm working on a script where I'm given a CSV file with info (first and last names, ssn, address, etc) and I first need to separate everything, which the code does, but then I need to make an output file with the first letter of the first name, last 3 letters of last name, and more... My problem is the output file is blank after I run the script to see if anything is getting written in. See code below 

 
#! /usr/bin/perl
# CSC 310 Project # 1


print "Enter filename: ";
chomp($fileName = <STDIN>);
open (FILE, '<', $fileName) || die ("Could not open $fileName\n");


while ($line = <FILE>){
    print "\n";
    ($lastName,$firstName,$ssn,$address,$city,$state,$zip,$phone) = sp
+lit ',', $line;
    print "$lastName, $firstName\n"."$ssn\n"."$address\n", "$city $sta
+te $zip\n";

    open (PSWD, '>>', 'passwd.txt');
    print PSWD "$firstName[1]\n";
}

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Any help or reference to help is appreciated!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Output to another file help
by roboticus (Chancellor) on Nov 08, 2012 at 21:21 UTC

    jaffinito34:

    You're treating $firstName as an array reference, but it's presumably a string. What you want to do is create a variable that holds the first initial, then you can print that. Something like this:

    my $firstName = 'Marco';
my $firstInitial = substr($firstName, 0, 1);
print "First initial is '$firstInitial'\n";

    [download]

    Read the documentation for substr to see how it works.

    ...roboticus

    When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

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      Nevermind, found out about lc() function.

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      PERFECT!, any ideas how to quickly convert the firstInitial to lowercase? Right now my script outputs the first initial, first 3 of the last name, and last 4 of ssn, but it does so that it looks like this:

      First, Last, 000-000-0000, etc...

      output: FLas0000

      I'm trying to get it like: flas0000

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Re: Output to another file help
by space_monk (Chaplain) on Nov 09, 2012 at 01:29 UTC
    Please in the name of whatever deity/deities you worship, stop using "split" to break up lines of CSV files and use Text::CSV or a similar library instead.

    In the particular example, the original program is reading in an address, which is almost certain to contain a comma somewhere, and the normal way round that is to quote the field. split won't handle this, but CSV parsing libraries such as Text::CSV will take it in their stride.

    A Monk aims to give answers to those who have none, and to learn from those who know more.
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Re: Output to another file help
by Kenosis (Priest) on Nov 08, 2012 at 22:13 UTC

    ...I need to make an output file with the first letter of the first name, last 3 letters of last name...

    use strict;
use warnings;

my $firstName = 'PATRICK';
my $lastName  = 'STERL';

my $fileNamePart = "$firstName$lastName" =~ s/^(.).+(...)$/\L$1$2/r;

warn qq{Be careful: "$fileNamePart" may be an obscene word.};

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