Re: rearranging text

How about this? ;-)

use strict;

my $prev;
while (<DATA>) {
  next if /^\s*$/;
  chomp (my ($curr, $val) = split /,\s+/);
  print $prev ? "\n" : "", $prev = $curr if $curr ne $prev;
  print ", $val";
}
print "\n";

__DATA__
a, 1
aa, 3
aa, 5
aa, 8
b, 2
b, 3
bb, 5
[download]

Comment on Re: rearranging text Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: rearranging text by kiat (Vicar) on Dec 02, 2003 at 08:34 UTC
Hey Roger, Can you enlighten on the purpose of '\s+' in the split expression?	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: rearranging text by Roger (Parson) on Dec 02, 2003 at 10:57 UTC
`\s` means match a single space, `\s+` means match one or more spaces. In the example below: `use strict; use Data::Dumper; my $string = 'a, 1, 2, 3'; my @split_comma = split /,/, $string; print "\@split_comma =>", Dumper(\@split_comma); my @split_comma_space = split /,\s+/, $string; print "\@split_comma_space =>", Dumper(\@split_comma_space);` [download] Notice in the output - `@split_comma =>$VAR1 = [ 'a', ' 1', ' 2', ' 3' ]; @split_comma_space =>$VAR1 = [ 'a', '1', '2', '3' ];` [download] Splitting with comma only leaves spaces in array elements, while splitting with comma+space leaves no spaces in array elements. What `split /,\s+/` does is to set the separator as comma followed by 1 or more spaces, thus eliminating the spaces from the result.	[reply] [d/l] [select]