Hi,
I'm 1 month into learning Perl and done reading "Minimal Perl" by Tim Maher (which I enjoyed enoumously). I'm not a programmer by profession but want to use Perl to automate various tasks at my job. I have a problem (obviously) and are looking for your much appreciated help.

THE TASK:
1) I need to test the records from a text file with fields delimited by semicolon (infile.txt).
2) At the end of the test I need to generate a report containing the tested records (outfile.txt).
3) I want to use the implicit file loop available by the -n invocation option to go about the task in an AWKish way (but using AWK is not an option).
4) By way of the implicit loop the read lines from infile.txt should be pushed into an array.
5) In the END block the contents of the array should be written to the outfile.

My test file (infile.txt) contains 3 records of 3 semicolon delimited fields each: 
1;2;3
a;b;c
4;5;6

[download]
The script is invoked from the command line by:
c:\perl test.pl infile.txt

My environment is Strawberry Perl, v.5.10.1 on Windows XP.

My stripped down script (stripped of everything irrelevant to the problem) is called test.pl: 
 
#! usr/bin/perl -wlnaF';'
use strict;

{
  my $outfile = "outfile.txt";
  my @result;

  # Assign fields to variables
  my $var1 = $F[0];     
  my $var2 = $F[1];     
  my $var3 = $F[2];     

  # Push fields into an array
  push @result, ( "$var1 $var2 $var3" );  

  # This debug print shows all 3 infile lines were processed
  print "Processed infile line no.: $.";

  END { 
    
    # This debug print shows only 1 element in array
    print "Array contains: " . @result . " element(s).";

    # pass array by reference and filename by value
    writeToFile( \@result, $outfile );
  }
}

sub writeToFile {
  # Takes a reference to an array and a filename as input
  # Writes the contents of the array to the file
  my $array_ref = $_[0];
  my $filename = $_[1];
  open OUTFILE, "> $filename"
    or die;
  foreach ( @{ $array_ref } ) {
    print OUTFILE;
  }
  close OUTFILE;
}

[download]
THE PROBLEM:
Allthough all 3 records from the infile gets processed (a print statement reveals this during processing) only the first record makes it to the array and from the array to the outfile (another print statement and the outfile reveals this).

What am I doing wrong? - pls help!

Best regards,
John

In reply to Push records to array during implicit loop and write to file by jospan

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