Split on whitespace or other criteria

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

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Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by bgreenlee (Friar) on Jan 30, 2005 at 20:33 UTC
This will work for your example: `my @cols = split /\s+\|(?<=\d)(?=\-)/;` [download] It splits on whitespace or on a boundry where there's a digit followed by a dash. -b	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by Tanktalus (Canon) on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:03 UTC
That doesn't look like a split file ... it looks like a substr file. And, of course, the best way to get fields from a fixed-width line is ... unpack. `while(<DATA>) { my @fields = unpack "A7A6A*", $_; print join(':', map { sprintf "%.2f", $_ } @fields), "\n"; } __DATA__ 123.45 345.3 234.67 34.56 234.1 123.87 897.34 567.32-100.90` [download] Of course, such a small sample of your data doesn't lend itself to perfect analysis, so the regexp's may be more suiting.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by neniro (Priest) on Jan 30, 2005 at 20:38 UTC
`#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dumper; while(<DATA>) { chomp; s/-/ -/g; print Dumper [split(/\s+/, $_)]; } __DATA__ 123.45 345.3 234.67 34.56 234.1 123.87 897.34 567.32-100.90` [download] How about adding a blank before the '-'sign.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Split on whitespace or other criteria by Anonymous Monk on Jan 30, 2005 at 20:42 UTC
yes, should hav mention that a blank is required before -ve sign thanks	[reply]
Re^3: Split on whitespace or other criteria by sh1tn (Priest) on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:01 UTC
`@array = grep { $_ !~ /^\s$/ } split '(\d+(?:\.\d)*)+\|\D+', $line;` So there is no matter what chars you put between digits.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: Split on whitespace or other criteria by Anonymous Monk on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:12 UTC
Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:05 UTC
`split /\s+\|(?=-)/` [download] This works (somewhat surprisingly) even in the case where there is a space before the minus. That is because split will not split a string in the same place twice (to avoid infinitely returning empty fields). Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by borisz (Canon) on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:09 UTC
Propaby `m//` is even usable for you. I suppose a line is in `$_`. `my @values = /\d+\.\d+/g;` [download] Boris	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by dimar (Curate) on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:17 UTC
Just curious ... why do people seem to use `/(?=\-)/` [download] ... in regex, instead of ... `/[\-]/` [download] Is the latter variant inferior? going out of style?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Split on whitespace or other criteria by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Jan 30, 2005 at 23:12 UTC
The former is a lookahead; it does not eat a character. The latter consumes the "-". Oh, there's no need to backslash it. Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply]
Re: Split on whitespace or other criteria by Anonymous Monk on Jan 30, 2005 at 21:26 UTC
the split methods all work, however, how can i insert a whitespace before the negative value when putting into an array? `123.45 65.78-100.98 becoms 123.45 65.78 -100.98` [download] thanks for your help people	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Split on whitespace or other criteria by vek (Prior) on Jan 31, 2005 at 13:19 UTC
neniro already gave you a solution for that. Are you still having problems? -- vek --	[reply]