Simple line regex again

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

Thanks for your help with my last post, it worked great. Now I am getting a little more complex and I need to make sure it works correctly or I may end up screwing up some of my data.

I have a folder tree of month names using the first 3 three letters (Jan, Feb, Mar). Inside each folder are text files, 1 for each day of the month. Titled 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt and so on and so on.

In my text file, I have the Month, Day, Year and Text. I want to automatically make a script go through my folder tree and input text where it should go (at the bottom of the correct Month/day file). A sample of the INPUT file is

Jan 1, 1915      (Birthday) Franck Pourcel - singer
Jan 3, 1926     (Birthday) George Martin - singer
Jan 3, 1945     (Birthday) Stephen Stills - singer
Jan 3, 1946     (Birthday) John Paul Jones - singer
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A sample of the file I am OUTPUTTING TO

1963 G Woods succeeds Eugene Black as president of the World Bank 
1964 Federation of Rhodesia & Nyasaland dissolved 
1965 International Cooperation Year begins
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The output file only has the year, a space, and the TEXT. The other data from the INPUT file is used to locate the correct file.

This is what I have so far. I think it would work if the regex was matching, but it's not. Can anyone help me with this? I did the best I could.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

open(LOG, "source.txt") or die "Error: $!";
my @lines = <LOG>;
close(LOG);

foreach my $line (@lines)
{
   $line =~ m/(\w)\s+(\d+),\s+(\d+)\s+(\(Birthday\)\s.+)/i;   # 1 is m
+onth, 2 is day of month, 3 is year, 4 is the text
    print "$1    $2    $3   $4\n";

    open(OUT, ">> $1/$2.txt") or die "Error"; # write our line appendi
+ng to the bottom of the file
    print OUT "$3, $4\n";
}

print "Done";
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Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Simple line regex again by davidrw (Prior) on Jun 17, 2006 at 02:49 UTC
I think it would work if the regex was matching, but it's not. what's the observed behavior? At a glance, i suspect that your first capture should be `(\w+)` instead of a single character. Also, you _must_ check if the pattern matched or not .. `$line =~ m/ ... /i or next; $line =~ m/ ... /i or die "line '$line' failed to match"; $line =~ m/ ... /i or do { # log it somewhere next; };` [download] Probably also want to `-d $1 \|\| mkdir $1;` to make sure the directory exists.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Simple line regex again by sulfericacid (Deacon) on Jun 17, 2006 at 02:46 UTC
I'll take a stab at this. I did test this and it appears to work flawlessly. `open(LOG, "source2.txt") or die "Error: $!"; my @lines = <LOG>; close(LOG); foreach my $line (@lines) { $line =~ m/(.+)\s+(\d+),\s+(\d+)\s+($Birthday$ .+)/; print "$1 $2 $3 $4\n"; open(OUT, ">> $1/$2.txt") or die "Error"; print OUT "\n$3 $4"; } print "Done";` [download] "Age is nothing more than an inaccurate number bestowed upon us at birth as just another means for others to judge and classify us" sulfericacid	[reply] [d/l]