mrxg4 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello Perl Monks,
I have been briefly been working with Perl and have mainly been using it to automate my daily tasks. Now, I'm writting a script that reads from a file, and analyses the first character of every line to format it.

For instance, if there is a line that reads "R Whatever", it becomes <li>Whatever</li>. That's all easy and has been written already.

The problem actually lies with another type of format. Example:
K Perl
K Monks
K Is
K Cool

Here, I need it to be outputted as:
<p>%Perl,%Monks,%Is,%Cool</p>

Since I'm reading every line individually I'm having a hard time formatting it this way, and especially knowing when to put the ending </p> tag.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks for taking your time to read this :)

Marcos

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Formatting
by atcroft (Abbot) on Jul 10, 2004 at 03:28 UTC

    Just off the top of my head, could you not do something like this (untested code): 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $infilename  = 'blah.dat';
my $outfilename = 'blah.out';
my (%data);

open(DF, $infilename) 
  or die("Can't open $infilename for input: $!\n");
while (my $line = <DF>) {
    chomp($line);
    my @parts = split(/\s/, $line, 2);
    push(@{$data{$parts[0]}}, $parts[1]);
}
close(DF);

open(OUTF, '>' . $outfilename) 
  or die("Can't open $outfile for output: $!\n");
foreach my $k (sort(keys(%data))) {
    print OUTF "<p>", join(', ', @{$data{$k}}), "</p>\n";
}
close(OUTF);

    [download]

    Basically, the idea would be to push the data into an array, then join them as you liked.

    Hope that helps....

[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Formatting
by wfsp (Abbot) on Jul 10, 2004 at 11:45 UTC
    Sometimes it's best to create a table and lookup the formatting as you iterate through the file.
    Read more... (3 kB)
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Hey,
      First of all, thanks to all who replied!

      John, I like you sample script because, like you said, its flexible. I've tried it out and it works all well except one thing, after a </li>, when it has to start with another <li>, it does it all in the same line. I've tried adding a \n to the close string, but it isn't working, its getting outputted instead of interpreted.

      Like I said before, I'm new in Perl and this is probably really easy to fix.

      Thanks again! I really appreciate it :)
      Marcos
[reply]
        Glad you liked it. I've put another condition in the if block:
          if ( $tag->{ $style }->{ block } and ! $block_flag ){
    $output = join( '',
                    $output,
                    $tag->{ $style }->{ block_open },
                    $line_out );
    $block_flag = $style;
  }
  elsif ( ! $tag->{ $style }->{ block } and $block_flag ){
    $output = join( '',
                    $output,
                    $tag->{ $block_flag }->{ block_close },
                    "\n",
                    $line_out,
                    "\n" );
    $block_flag = '';
  }
  elsif ( ! $tag->{ $style }->{ block } ){
    $output = join( '',
                    $output,
                    $line_out,
                    "\n" );
  }
  else{
    $output = join( '',
                    $output,
                    $line_out );
  }

        [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Formatting
by murugu (Curate) on Jul 10, 2004 at 04:35 UTC

    Iam not a great guy in regular expression.

    I have tried a little with regular expressions. 

    use strict;
use warnings;
undef $/;
my $str;
($str=<DATA>)=~s{(((\n|^)K (.*?)(?=\n|$))+)}{"$3<p>".${($_=$1)=~s!(\n|
+^)K !,%!g,\$_}."</p>"}eg;
$str=~s/(<p>),/$1/g;
print $str;

    [download]

    Please forgive any thing i have done silly in the above code.

[reply]
[d/l]

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