Re: Combining flat file records

Perhaps this is fishing for you rather than teaching you to fish, but here's how I'd do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my %result;
for my $row(<DATA>) {
    my($num,$date,$time)=split /\s+/,$row;
    push @{ $result{$num}->{$date} }, $time;
}
for my $num(sort keys %result) {
    for my $date(sort keys %{$result{$num}}) {
        my %contains;
        my @time_ary;
        for my $time(sort @{$result{$num}->{$date}} ){
            push @time_ary, $time unless $contains{$time}++;
        }
        printf "%s\t%s\t%s\n", $num,$date,join(',',@time_ary);
    }
}
__DATA__
848    05/23/06    11:00
848    05/23/06    12:30
848    05/23/06    13:00
848    05/23/06    14:00
848    05/25/06    11:00
848    05/25/06    12:00
261    05/24/06    11:00
261    05/24/06    12:30
261    05/24/06    13:00
261    05/24/06    13:00
261    05/24/06    13:00
261    05/24/06    13:00
[download]

Comment on Re: Combining flat file records Download Code

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Re^2: Combining flat file records by ikegami (Patriarch) on May 08, 2006 at 23:16 UTC
If speed or memory is an issue, one could avoid loading the entire file into memory as follows: my $last_id; my $last_date; my @times; for (;;) { my $line = <DATA>; my ($id, $date, $time) = split(' ', $line\|\|''); if ($. != 1) { if ((!defined($id) && @times) \|\| $id ne $last_id \|\| $date ne $last_date ) { print(join("\t", $last_id, $last_date, join(',', @times)), "\ +n"); $#times = -1; } } last unless defined($line); $last_id = $id; $last_date = $date; push(@times, $time) if !@times \|\| $times[-1] ne $time; } __DATA__ 848 05/23/06 11:00 848 05/23/06 12:30 848 05/23/06 13:00 848 05/23/06 14:00 848 05/25/06 11:00 848 05/25/06 12:00 261 05/24/06 11:00 261 05/24/06 12:30 261 05/24/06 13:00 261 05/24/06 13:00 261 05/24/06 13:00 261 05/24/06 13:00 [download] It also preserves the order of the ids in the output.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Combining flat file records by jZed (Prior) on May 09, 2006 at 17:25 UTC
Um, yeah. I was being lazy. Better to get it all in one pass as you show.	[reply]
Re^2: Combining flat file records by pglinx (Acolyte) on May 08, 2006 at 23:34 UTC
Thank you, I new how to loop through a file using foreach to reformat the output, but was not sure how to actually combine it, especially in one field. Thanks for the help and for teaching me how to fish. It worked great.	[reply]