A co-worker supports a POS system. At month end, system A creates some new XML, and sends them to System B that processes them into a billing system.

Problem is that System B only handles a 10 character OPERATORID value, and System A will create 12 character OPERATORID's. So hundred's of these are rejected. cute, eh?

So we get System A to only send 10 chars, right? wrong.

For whatever reason, this co-worker decided to HAND MASSAGE the files and using notepad to truncate all the rogue >10 chars strings.

Last month the system spit out over 400 of these rejections (business is picking up!).

while watching this co-worker hand-massage these files, I decided to write up a quick script to do it for him.

It's not going to win any prizes in a perl contest, but it sure solved a huge problem for my co-worker.

The file works against one file at a time (it started as an attempt at a one-liner, but time was of the essence and I was not clever enough to do it that way). I wrote a second perl script to build a big .BAT file from the directory listing the files resided in. The batch file executes this script against each file.

I thought I would just share the story, but I will be brave and include the code, such as it is. 

#!perl.exe 
#  invoke as follows:
#  perl -p -i.BAK posfix.pl FILENAMETOPROCESS
#
if ( /OPERATORID/ ) 
{ 
    $_ =~ s/<OPERATORID>//;
    $_=~ s/<\/OPERATORID>//;
    $_=substr($_,0,10);
    $_ = "<OPERATORID>". $_ . "</OPERATORID>\n";
}

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In reply to Quick solutions to easy problems by wardk

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