This is more of a success story than a CUFP, but I had to share.
I've been learning and using Perl more or less since I signed up to PM (so, 18 days or so), though a programmer for some time longer. Still, this was a nice way to validate to myself that I could use it for some "off the cuff" tasks.
A coworker asked me (as the resident Vim guru) if I knew a Vim trick that would quickly convert an Erlang term in an error log he was reading into something readable. For those who don't know, Erlang has a funny way of doing strings: it doesn't! A list of integers which are all printable ASCII (e.g. [65,66,67]) will be pretty-printed as "ABC", and any list where at least one element isn't printable will be rendered as a list instead. That means, for example, that a single Unicode character will make your entire string print as a nice long list of numbers.
Lists are stored as cons cells in Erlang; i.e. not very efficiently for strings, so they also have a "binary string", which more like normally malloced buffer of bytes with known length. They're pretty-printed as <<"hello">>, or again, <<65, 10, 192>> if there are unprintables.
In the situation that unfolded at work, we had the full HTML of a webpage being spewed out in a debug log, except some stranger characters caused the entire thing to print as a very long list of numbers (which didn't do wonders for debugging). Thus my Vim skills were consulted -- and honestly, I had no idea with Vim. But Vim and Perl?
:'<,'>!perl -pe 'chomp; $_ =~ s/[<>]*//g; $_ = join "", map { chr $_ } split ",", $_'Voilà! HTML came spewing onto the page. I was so happy that I got it on the first try. :) On reflection, map chr, split "," would have worked just as well. Next time!
Anne
Edit: on reflection, how about :'<,'>!perl -ne 'print join "", map chr, split ",", s/[<>]*//gr'? I didn't need chomp after all!
In reply to A little win by anneli
| For: | Use: | ||
| & | & | ||
| < | < | ||
| > | > | ||
| [ | [ | ||
| ] | ] |