Hi all,

I wrote the script to show the MP3 tags in the table (parsing output of the eyeD3 command), so I check the length of each string and store the longest it in the hash. Later on I am using this info to print it like this:

 printf("%*s", $len, $str)

The problem is that each time I run the script I am getting a different results (different strings lengths for the same input). Is this a bug in a Perl? If not, then how to make it work the same way all the time? My Perl version is v5.24.1 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

$| = 1;

sub update_max(\%$$);

my $inp = $ARGV[0] || '*.mp3';

my @list = qx/eyeD3 --no-color $inp/;
chomp(@list);

my %data; 
my $nr = 0;
my @attr = qw(artist album track tracks year genre title size file );

foreach my $line (@list) {

    next if ($line =~ m/^-+$/);

    if ($line =~ m#([^/]*\.mp3).*\[ (\d*\.\d*) MB \]#) {
        $nr++;
        $data{$nr}{'file'} = $1;
        $data{$nr}{'size'} = $2;
    }

    if ($line =~ m#title: (.*)#)     { $data{$nr}{'title'}  = $1; }
    if ($line =~ m#^artist: (.*)#)   { $data{$nr}{'artist'} = $1; }
    if ($line =~ m#album: (.*)#)     { $data{$nr}{'album'}  = $1; }

    if ($line =~ m#(release|recording) date: (.*)#){ 
        $data{$nr}{'year'}   = $2; 
    }
    
    if ($line =~ m#track: (\d+)/(\d+).*genre:\s+(\w+)#)  { 
        $data{$nr}{'track'} = $1; 
        $data{$nr}{'tracks'} = $2; 
        $data{$nr}{'genre'} = $3;
    }
}

# count length of the strings
my %len;
foreach $nr (keys %data) {
    foreach my $att (@attr) {
        $len{$att} = 0;
        update_max(%len, $att, $data{$nr}{$att});
    }
}

# print using lengths
foreach $nr (sort keys %data) {
    printf("|");

    foreach my $att (@attr) { 

        if ($att eq 'track') {
            printf(" %02d |", $data{$nr}{$att});
        } else {
            printf(" %-*s |", $len{$att}, $data{$nr}{$att});
        }
    }
    printf("\n");
}

######################################################
sub update_max(\%$$) {
    my ($ref_data, $att, $val) = @_;

    my $siz  = $ref_data->{$att};
    my $siz2 = length($val);

    if ($siz < $siz2) {
        $ref_data->{$att} = $siz2;
    }
}

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In reply to Printf with a minimum width. by Zaxonxp

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