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

Hello. I wish to open a flatfile test.txt containing a single record and display this in a html table. Problem is that I only want to display certain fields and these fields, while always delimited with the same char are sometimes written on a newline. I can handle the nice one-record-per-row flatfile db's but this is a step beyond me. Any chance of a push in the right direction, it would be appreciated
Thanks!

***** BEGIN CONTENTS test.txt *******
SMQ2#TEST_2PASS TEST_671 TEST_ADV TEST_LGA TEST_ROOS#2#0
testguy#2002-07-24#13:47#testguy#2002-09-12#12:05#I295
Selective retest only
*#*
1
2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2
1# elapsedMinutes
elapsedMinutes#elapsedMinutesPass2
1
1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1
**** RECORD EOF ***********


The fields I want to extract and display are..

Line 1
SMQ2 -> Batch Suffix ID
TEST_2PASS -> Associated Operations

Line 2
testguy -> Record Created
2002-07-24 -> Record Created Date
13:47 ->Record Created Time
testguy -> Record Last Updated
2002-09-12 -> Record Last Updated Date
12:05 -> Record Last Updated Time
I295 Selective retest only -> Record Description

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Difficult flatfile db record
by samurai (Monk) on Sep 16, 2002 at 16:03 UTC
    You could probably first just slurp lines one and two into an array:

    open FH, $file or die "Can't open $file: $!";
my @lines = (<FH>)[0,1];
close FH;

    [download]
    If the fields are fixed length, you can separate them with unpack. If they are whitespace delimited, split /\s+/ will do to break up the line. Otherwise, you might need a hefty regex. But it looks like they're whitespace delimited, so you could do:

    my %data = ();

# define all field names
my @line1_fields = qw/ batch_suffix_id associated_operations /;
my @lines2_fields = qw/ record_created record_created_date ... /;

@data{ @line_1_fileds } = split /\s+/, $lines[0];
@data{ @line_2_fields } = split /\s+/, $lines[1];

    [download]
    There, now you have a hash with all your field names.

    --
    perl: code of the samurai

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Thank's Samurai,

      I'll go play around with that. Fields in each line are # delimited so I should be okay..

      -testguy
[reply]
        Oops... heh. Yeah, just split /#/ instead of /\s+/ :)

        --
        perl: code of the samurai

[reply]

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