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

Dear Monks,
Please be kind...
I have a file that looks something like this:
SABFBXGNP^@00:01:A6:D9:AF:D4^@^L^\^@^2^@A|@SABFBXGTG^@00:01:A6:D9:B0:8 +E...
The first part, SA......., is a serial number and the second part, 00:..:..:..:..:.., is the corresponding MAC address. There are no delimiters (save for the ^@ and ^@^L^\^2^@A|@), whitespaces, returns or new lines in the file.
My question is this: As I will need to run this on a similar file each month or so, what is the most flexible way for me to turn this mess into a hash, assuming the serial numbers will always begin with SA, the MAC addresses will begin with 00: and both will remain a consistent number of characters (not sure if the 'delimiters' will remain the same in each version of the file)?
THANK YOU!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: funky file
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 26, 2002 at 21:33 UTC
    Maybe this will help you out

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my @serialNums = (); my @macAddrs = (); while(<DATA>) { my @a = ( /SA......./g ); for( my $i=0; $i <= $#a; $i++ ) { push( @serialNums, $a[$i] ); } @a = ( /00:..:..:..:..:../g ); for( my $i=0; $i <= $#a; $i++ ) { push( @macAddrs, $a[$i] ); } } foreach my $s ( @serialNums ) { print "s=[$s]\n"; } foreach my $m ( @macAddrs ) { print "m=[$m]\n"; } __DATA__ Dear Monks, Please be kind... I have a file that looks something like this: SABFBXGNP^@00:01:A6:D9:AF:D4^@^L^\^@^2^@A|@SABFBXGTG^@00:01:A6:D9:B0:8 +E... The first part, SA......., is a serial number and the second part, 00: +..:..:..:..:.., is the corresponding MAC address. There are no delimiters (save for the ^@ and ^@^L^\^2^@A|@), +whitespaces, returns or new lines in the file. My question is this: As I will need to run this on a similar file each + month or so, what is the most flexible way for me to turn this mess into a hash, assuming the serial numbers +will always begin with SA, the MAC addresses will begin with 00: and both will remain a consistent number + of characters (not sure if the 'delimiters' will remain the same in each version of the file)? THANK YOU!

    Here's the output ...
    $ ./getStr.pl s=[SABFBXGNP] s=[SABFBXGTG] s=[SA.......] s=[SA, the M] m=[00:01:A6:D9:AF:D4] m=[00:01:A6:D9:B0:8E] m=[00:..:..:..:..:..]
Re: funky file
by mephit (Scribe) on Apr 27, 2002 at 03:51 UTC
    Hmm, I might try something like the following.
    my %hash; while (<FH>) { %hash = m/(SA.......).*?(00:..:..:..:..:..)/g; }