I'm trying to work out where your sentence boundaries are -- if you add periods and sentence-initial capitalization in the paragraph text, that would help...

each file has multiple records, example I provided was merely one of them

If you have trouble figuring out how to parse the input files, start a new thread on that. As I mentioned in my first reply, it should be easy to work out how the file contents are arranged, and to treat them accordingly.

it looks like the +? isn't working quite the way I though it would in this one line though..

I have no clue what you're talking about there -- maybe if you show a specific input data set and the resulting output, and explain what's wrong with that output, it will be clear what's wrong.

I was thinking I would do an ole call to excel and just dump the values right on in there without the names but it doesnt..

I know nothing about ole, and I see no reason to go there, since I do know that a simple comma-delimited file, with a single line at the top for column headings, works fine for importing to excel.

Of course, if the "values" contain commas (and quotes), then it is not simple, because fields containing commas as data need to be quoted, and quotes occurring as data in any field need to be escaped.

As a rule, it's fairly common for commas and quotes to appear in text data, but it's probably a lot less likely that your data files contain tabs, so you might consider writing tab-delimited output instead of comma delimited -- that works equally well for importing to excel.

In reply to Re^3: parsing files and modifying format by graff
in thread parsing files and modifying format by grashoper

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.