Splitting on unprintables

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

I'd like to split a "text" file based on an unprintable record delimiter: \x0a. The input file is basically like this:

\x0a  Record stuff goes here
       more of the same record here
       yet more record data.
\x0a  Next record starts here
       and continues on for a while
       and finally terminates.
\x0a  You get the idea.  Please note
       that \x0a is a one-character ASCII code,
       not the string of characters '\x0a'.
\x0a  I probably can't rely on indents for
      record boundary checking, either.
[download]

--- Code snippet begins ---

use strict;  # I'm not a total neanderthal

$/ = /\x0a/; # also tried '\x0a'
open IN, shift;
my @records = <IN>;
close IN;

# number of records == 1 (globbed!)
[download]

I suspect that my $/ = /\x0a/ and $/ = '\x0a' fails because \x0a isn't text, right? Must I do an unpack(), or am I overlooking something?

Thanks,
rje

Comment on Splitting on unprintables Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Splitting on unprintables by ChrisS (Monk) on Aug 13, 2003 at 16:54 UTC
Try: `$/ = "\x0a";` [download] Single-quoted strings don't use escape characters like "\n" or "\x".	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Splitting on unprintables by hardburn (Abbot) on Aug 13, 2003 at 17:00 UTC
Does the file contain the literal text of '\x0a', or is it just the hex value of an ASCII character in the file. If literal text, then `$/ = '\x0a'` should work. If its the ASCII value (0x0A == ASCII Line Feed), then I'm guessing you're probably getting this from a nix system and are parsing it on something else. Try setting `$/ = "\n"` or maybe `$/ = 0x0A`. Also, remember that `$/` does not* contain regular expressions. ---- I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident. -- Schemer Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Splitting on unprintables by sauoq (Abbot) on Aug 13, 2003 at 21:27 UTC
maybe `$/ = 0x0A`. Uh, no. That's equivalent to `$/ = 10`. He should be using an escape within a double quoted string (as in `$/ = "\0xa"`) or perhaps `chr()` (as in `$/ = chr(0x0a)`). -sauoq "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";	[reply] [d/l]