concating problem

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

Hi,
I am at my wits end here. I am trying to change a date format from month/day/year to year-month-day. Easy right? This works as expected:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $string = "9/1/2001";
my ($month, $day, $year) = split('/', $string);
my $new_date = join('-', $year, $month, $day);
print "$new_date\n";
[download]

but this doesn't :

...
my $string = $line[11];
my ($month, $day, $year) = split('/', $string);
my $new_date = join('-', $year, $month, $day);
...
[download]

$new_date becomes: "-month-day". I tried:
$new_date = $year.'-'.$month.'-'.$day;

But I get the same result. After some experimentation, it seems the month is starting at the beginning of the string, and overwriting everything after it. During debugging, I see the split works fine, I just can't seem to put it back together correctly.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Thanks.

The worst feeling?
Realizing what you thought was true, is not.

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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: concating problem by Thelonius (Priest) on Apr 21, 2003 at 17:26 UTC
`chomp($string);` [download] Update: I really should add that if the string contains just a '\r' (and it looks like it might), chomp won't actually work. You'll have to $string =~ s/\r//g; or $string =~ tr/\r//d;	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: concating problem by doubtingben (Novice) on Apr 21, 2003 at 18:31 UTC
Thanks, `$string =~ s/\r//g;` worked. I did already have a chomp in there, with this addition, life makes sense again.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: concating problem by krujos (Curate) on Apr 21, 2003 at 17:16 UTC
Have you checked that `$line[11]` really contains the date? It looks like your missing the year field (i.e. the string contains month/day). update: fixed formatting	[reply] [d/l]
Re: concating problem by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Apr 21, 2003 at 18:18 UTC
gbarr has given us Date::Parse so that we do not need to do this sort of thing (splitting dates that is). (Date::Manip would work too but it's a bit big for such a simple project.) `#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use Date::Parse; my $string = "9/1/2001"; my ($day,$month,$year) = (strptime($string))[3..5]; $month++; $year+=1900; my $new_date = join('-', $year, $month, $day); print $new_date,$/;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]