in reply to For loop problem

for ($d=1;$d<10;$d++){
That's going to iterate $d from 1 to 9. Its valid syntax, but its easier to read, and more perlish this way:
for my $d ( 1..9 ) {

if ($line =~ /^(\d{1,10})/){
This is going to evaluate to true if $line contains a string of numbers. It will assign up to the first 10 consequitive numbers into $1.

if ($d =~ /^$key$/){
This is going to evaluate true if the string of numbers is contained within $d. In other words, this is going to evaluate to true if the very first string of numbers that you found in $line was a single digit between 0 and 9. So, any of the following lines are guaranteed to never match:

this is my 023 string
hello 10
hi there 0
how are you 03

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Re: Re: For loop problem
by matth (Monk) on Nov 29, 2002 at 10:35 UTC
    Thanks for your advice which has raised a point and a question in my mind. Point: The tags are on the inner most left side of the text file. I need $d and $key to be an exact numeric match. Question: Does the if ($d =~ /^$key$/){ not cover this in every circumstance? Point: I tried to do a numeric match but the $key is treated as a string.
[reply]
[d/l]
      Something like this would probably make more sense (if I understand your situation correctly): 
      open( OUTPUT_XML_A_OPEN, $output_XML_A_open );
open( NEW_OUTPUT_XML_A, "+>>", $new_output_xml_a );
for $d ( 1..9 ) {
  seek( OUTPUT_XML_A_OPEN, 0, 0 );
  while (<OUTPUT_XML_A_OPEN>) {
    chomp;   # I'm leaving out a lot of your debugging stuff
    if( /^$d\D/ ) {  # does this line start with "$d"?
      print NEW_OUTPUT_XML_A;
    }
  }
}

      [download]

      As I understand it, you are trying to find lines in the input file that begin with single-digit numbers, and print these to an output file in sorted order (all the "1" lines first, then all the "2" lines, etc), without worrying about any sub-sort ordering (all the "1" lines can be in any order).

      In that regard, I wonder why you open the output file for "append" access (">>") -- and why you open it for both read and write access (using "+"), when you don't really need to read it here?

[reply]
[d/l]

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