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

Hello, Pretty new to Perl so please go lightly: I have a file that looks like this at the end of each line. 

Order|09/12/2001|Product|
Address|Email|Username

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How do I break this out so that each field is a variable. I then want to insert each variable into a mysql table, which seems to be the easy part. I just can't figure out how how to open the file and get each field to convert to a variable. Thanks to all ! Craig

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Re: Assigning scalar to each field in a flat file database
by BeernuT (Pilgrim) on Mar 08, 2002 at 03:26 UTC
    look at reading perlfunc:open and perlfunc:split, something like this is what your looking for 
    my @array = split(/\|/, $_);

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    or if you know the variables you have use something like: 
    my($var1, $var2, $var3) = split(/\|/, $_);

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    let me know if you need any help.

    -bn
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      Hi, thanks for the post, still having heartache! my text file looks like this: 
      
data|data1|data2|<BR>
data3|data4|data5|data6<BR><BR>

and so forth...there are about 87 fields split in no particular order 
+over 28 lines.  So, what am I doing wrong?  I am getting an internal 
+server error when I use the following code:<BR><BR>

#!/usr/bin/perl -w<BR>

print "Content-type:text/html\n\n";<BR>

open (DATA, "<../../cgi-bin/tracking_1_db.txt") || die;<BR>

while (<DATA>) {<BR>
   my @items = split (/|/, $_);<BR>
}<BR>
close (DATA);<BR>

<HTML><BR>

<HEAD><BR>

<TITLE>Perl Test Script 1</TITLE><BR>

</HEAD><BR>

<BODY><BR>

$items[0];<BR>
$items[1];<BR>

</BODY><BR>

</HTML><BR>

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        Well you kinda missed/ignored the code i posted. The split function takes a regular expression /PATTERN/ and in a // the character '|' is an 'or'. So use /\|/ instead. 
        @array = split(/\|/, $_);

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        That should help you out a little more.

        -bn
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Re: Assigning scalar to each field in a flat file database
by silent11 (Vicar) on Mar 08, 2002 at 05:18 UTC
    I then want to insert each variable into a mysql table .....

    No need to assign these values to variables, just dump them into a mysql table like such....
    LOAD DATA INFILE 'file_name.txt'
    INTO TABLE tbl_name 
    FIELDS TERMINATED BY '|' 
    LINES TERMINATED BY '\n'

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    Just be sure that your table has been created and all your columns exist, etc, etc ....
    -Silent11
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Re: Assigning scalar to each field in a flat file database
by vek (Prior) on Mar 08, 2002 at 05:39 UTC
    Just to expand a little on Beernut's post: 
    open (THEFILE, $theFile) || die "open $theFile $!\n";

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    Then use a while loop to process each line in the file: 
    while (<THEFILE>) {
   my @items = split (/|/, $_);
}
close (THEFILE);

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