I would suggest to set the input separator ($/) to paragraph mode (empty string) and get the product id from the beginning of every paragraph.
Some explanation(if needed). A text file is really just one long string of characters, e.g.:
line 1\nline 2\nline 3\n
By default, perl reads a file line by line, where the definition of a line is to read all the characters up to and including a newline(\n). However, a paragraph is denoted by two newlines(\n\n):
line1\nline2\n\nline1\nline2\n
The double newline is what creates the blank line. Try it: type some text and at the end of the line hit RETURN, then hit RETURN again--you'll get a paragraph. Each time you hit RETURN when you are typing some text, a newline is entered in your text.
Conveniently, perl allows you to change the definition of what a line is. You can tell perl that you want a line to consist of all the characters up to and including two consecutive newlines. That is known as paragraph mode, and you set paragraph mode by setting $/ to a blank string(yeah, it would make more sense to set it to "\n\n", but that's perl.).
The neat thing about being able to set the definition of a line is that you can also read chunks of files that look like this:
aaaaa bbbb ccccc .. ddddd eeeee fffffff ggggg ..
For instance:
use strict; use warnings; use 5.012; $/ = "..\n"; while (my $line = <DATA>) { say '-' x 20; print $line; say '=' x 20; } __DATA__ aaaaa bbbb ccccc xx ddddd eeeee fffffff ggggg xx --output:-- -------------------- aaaaa bbbb ccccc .. ==================== -------------------- ddddd eeeee fffffff ggggg .. ====================
The other common mode besides paragraph mode is slurp mode. If you set $/ to undef, then perl will read the whole file into a single string.
In reply to Re: Removing Duplicates from a multiline entry
by 7stud
in thread Removing Duplicates from a multiline entry
by diamondsandperls
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