isolate a filed from within a spreadsheet

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

I'm sorry to trouble you with this, but I just can't quite seem to break through.

I have a spreadsheet (tab delimited) and I want to put the information from field in a certain row into an array, add more information to it, and then put it back! I thought I would be able to get the information from the required field with the following, but as a test I tried to print the field and nothing happened.


my $checkthree = param('check');

open (DATA, "$data") || die "Couldn't get data";
           
@all=<DATA>;
close (DATA);



#Read each line of the data file
foreach $line (@all){
$line=~s/\n//g;
($one,$two,$three,$four,$five,$six,$seven,) = split ('\t',$line);}
  if ($checkthree == $three) {
   last;}
   

   
print "$four";
[download]

Could anybody point me in the right direction, please?

Comment on isolate a filed from within a spreadsheet Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: isolate a filed from within a spreadsheet by helgi (Hermit) on Nov 20, 2002 at 16:17 UTC
Is this a stealth CGI question? Including this: `my $checkthree = param('check');` [download] would tend to indicate that it is. You really should tell people, it is often highly relevant, albeit I think not in this case. You really, really should start your scripts by enabling warnings and strictures. It may seem like a lot of work, but in the long run it will pay you back in saved time a thousandfold. `use strict; use warnings; my $checkthree = param('check');` [download] You shouldn't use the filehandle DATA. DATA is a special filehandle for reading in data embedded in your script after the __END__ tag. `open IN, $data or die "Cannot open $data for reading:$!\n";` [download] There seems to be no need to read the data file into an array since you are only looping through it once. Use a while loop instead. Don't define variables that you don't use when splitting up the line. `while (my $line =<DATA>) { my (undef,undef,$three,$four,undef) = split "\t",$line; if ($three eq $checkthree) {print "$three found before $four in li +ne $.\n"; last;} } close DATA;` [download] -- Regards, Helgi Briem helgi AT decode DOT is	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: isolate a field from within a spreadsheet by jonnyfolk (Vicar) on Nov 20, 2002 at 18:42 UTC
Thank you very much for your help. I'm sorry for my faults - I did not mean to do anything by 'stealth' but I think adding all salient information is down to experience, which I am sadly lacking. Your explanations were very clear and and I will follow your general advice. Thanks to you I am back on the rails. Much appreciated.	[reply]
Re: isolate a filed from within a spreadsheet by hydo (Monk) on Nov 20, 2002 at 16:04 UTC
I was working on something like this last night and found DBI::CSV to work quite nicely. You can pass the seperator char during connect() so that you aren't bound to commas. `my $hndl = DBI->connect( qq{"DBI:CSV:f_dir=/stuff:csv_sep_char=\\t} );` [download] DBI::CSV for more info. I suspect '\t' is not quite right. \011 maybe?	[reply] [d/l]