So I'm being asked to generate a fairly large number of small text files (about 1 sentence long). The words can be the same every time, but each sentence has to contain a different bunch of numbers. It would look a bit like this:

"The lucky numbers of the day are _1, _2, _3, _4, _5 and don't forget to play again next week."
The aim of this is to test the performance of a recently developed text to speech synthesizer.

Anyway, this is what I've come up with so far (with some help from a friend). It kind of works a bit anyway (well the 2 number generator works, I'm still 'debugging' a.k.a. 'fixing my bad code' on the 5 number generator). I'd appreciate it if the monks have any suggestions for me.

use strict;

my $sentence_file = shift (@ARGV);
my $numbers_file = shift (@ARGV);

open SENTENCE, "$sentence_file" || die "cannot open $sentence_file for
+ reading: $!";
open NUMBERS, "$numbers_file" || die "cannot open $numbers_file for re
+ading: $!";

my $sentence = (<SENTENCE>)[0];
print "sentence: $sentence\n";

my @numbers = <NUMBERS>;
foreach my $number (@numbers) {
  my $working_sentence = $sentence;
  chomp $number;
  $number =~ s/\.$//g;

  my $output_file;
  if ($working_sentence =~ /_5/) {
    my $second_number = shift @numbers;
    my $third_number = shift @numbers;
    my $fourth_number = shift @numbers;
    my $fifth_number = shift @numbers;
  $working_sentence =~ s/_5/$number $second_number $third_number $four
+th_number $fifth_number/;
    $output_file = "number.test5.".$number."_".$fifth_number.".txt";

  } elsif ($working_sentence =~ /_2/) {
    my $second_number = shift @numbers;
    $working_sentence =~ s/_2/$number $second_number/;
    $output_file = "number.test2.".$number."_".$second_number.".txt";
  }

  open OUTPUT, ">$output_file" || die "cannot open $output_file for wr
+iting: $!";  print OUTPUT $working_sentence."\n";
  close OUTPUT;
}

[download]

I'm sorry - this could be formatted better, (and be a less stupid question) I'm still feeling my way a bit...ok, a lot! :p

'share and enjoy'

In reply to sentence generation by Ella

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