First of all, look here for a good introductory tutorial that should head you off in the right direction. Perl Monks' own tutorials contain a wealth of information.

Next, epoptai's home node has links to a number of online books that you might want to keep handy. You might want to consider reverse engineering the scripts you have using these books, since (I assume) you know what they do, if not exactly how they do it.

Not sure what a particular function does? Try "perldoc -f" followed by the name of the function at the command line...

Specifically regarding databases and Perl, I found this tutorial very clear and concise for a newbie like me:

One of the most confusing things I found about Perl when I first started where the regular expressions (seen something like s/\t.?\\s/ in your code?). Check out String matching and Regular Expressions and Common Regex Gotchas for help on this issue.

I hope this has been of some help. Good luck...

*~-}o{-~*

thank you for the prompt reply.. and apologies for putting so much in one Qs. :) anyways, let me rephrase my Qs: how would you load data from a flat file into a sybase database using perl scripts?

2 issues for you, best tackled one at a time. I've had to learn to do them both over the last little while, and barely suffered at all :)

1. Reading flat files. This is a v. basic example which reads the file line at a time and prints the results. You could modify this approach to send to Sybase instead:

   #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
   
   if (open(MYFILE, "path/to/file")) {
           $line = <MYFILE>;
           while ($line ne "") {
                   print ($line);
                   $line = <MYFILE>;
           }
   }
   [download]

2. Talking to a Sybase database. You'll need to come to grips with DBI/DBD. I doubt you will find it too difficult. It is pretty much a case of connecting to the database, executing an SQL command, then retrieving the results. The Tricks with DBI tutorial by btrott should head you off in the right direction.

   Have a look at davorg's reply below as well :)

*~-}o{-~*

Any script to insert data into a Sybase database will probably be using Sybperl or DBI/DBD::Sybase. The author of both of these modules is Michael Peppler and you can get a lot of good information from his web page at

• http://www.mbay.net/~mpeppler/

Also, I've done more than my fair share of Sybase/Perl work, so feel free to ask me anything.

Oh... and it's Perl, not PERL!

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

Seriously, you're asking for a whole lot of information, and doing it in a very general manner at that. Look through older nodes that deal with Sybase, Access, flat files, and whatever else you may need. You may find that the solution presents itself in a very clear and easy to implement way. Most likely, you'll have to massage the problem.

You are not far from help, for if you care to post specific problematic areas, someone will know the answer. But remember that a good post is one which helps us as much as we can help you. And from what I've seen, these monks can only help when they fully understand a problem.

ALL HAIL BRAK!!!

If you think this is a little harsh, perhaps you could highlight some parts of the scripts that you don't understand by posting the code here...

*~-}o{-~*

Unless the scripts themselves are well documented with comments no one here can tell you much of anything useful without seeing the code. You've asked exactly this question before and once again we're all going to tell you we don't email people, we have this whole great website to communicate with.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

However, if you just wish to interpret them, there are several things you could do... The easiest would be simply to try to track down whomever wrote them originally and see if you can get them to explain it to you. Sometimes author's will put an email address in the headers of a script so they can be contacted if bugs are found.
short of that, you could learn perl, which, even if you had someone sit down and explain to you what the script did, is the only real way you're ever going to be able to actually understand the script. Perl isn't an easy language to learn if you have no expirence, but its a very valueable thing to know.

-Nakano