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

This is the code i use to edit data in the file, this code finds the data and then removes the data from the file with the new line, but i dont want it to make new lines i want it to remove the data and then move the rest of the data up where the removed data was. 
    
open(FILE,"$location/$file");
        flock(FILE,2);
        @data = <FILE>;
        close(FILE);
        open(FILE,"$location/$file");
        while (<FILE>){
            ($name,$dir,$des,$dl,$style) = split(/\|/);
            if($name eq "$cat_name_del"){
                print FILE "\n";
            }
            else {
                print FILE "$name|$dir|$dl|$style|\n";
            }
        }

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: remove new lines in flat files
by jlongino (Parson) on Sep 03, 2001 at 22:15 UTC
    I'm not sure if I understand exactly what you want to do, but you probably want to leave off the

    "\n"

    from your print statements. Either that or do a

    chomp @data;

    after the

    @data = <FILE>;

    which is less efficient in this case.

    Update: Also you probably want to rewrite your if statement to look so, since the if part is not needed: 

    if($name ne "$cat_name_del"){
   print FILE "$name|$dir|$dl|$style|\n";
}

    [download]
    @a=split??,'just lose the ego and get involved!';
for(split??,'afqtw{|~'){print $a[ord($_)-97]}
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
Re: remove new lines in flat files
by tachyon (Chancellor) on Sep 03, 2001 at 22:55 UTC 
    my $file = "c:/test.txt";

# open file for both reading and writing
open FILE, "+<$file" or die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
my @file = <FILE>;         # get all data
make_backup($file, @file); # make a backup
seek FILE, 0, 0;           # go to beginging of file
truncate FILE, 0;          # delete all the old data

# now write only the lines we want back to file
# the newlines are still attached to each line
for my $line (@file) {
    print FILE $line unless $line eq "don't print\n";
}
close FILE;

# sub to write a backup
sub make_backup {
    my $file = shift;
    open BACKUP, ">$file.bak" or die "Can't write $file.bak: $!\n";
    print BACKUP @_;
    close BACKUP;
}

    [download]

    cheers

    tachyon

    s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

[reply]
[d/l]
      thx tachyon it worked..
[reply]
Re: remove new lines in flat files
by Hofmator (Curate) on Sep 04, 2001 at 12:36 UTC

    I just throw in the one liner: perl -i.bak -F\\\| -ane 'print unless $F[0] eq q/cat_name_del/' datafile

    -- Hofmator

[reply]
[d/l]

Back to Seekers of Perl Wisdom