A small comma parsing problem...

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

I have a tab delimited that looks somthing like this:

Name    City    Languages
Hong Xiao    Chongqing    English,Mandarin
Rob    Huston, TX    English,German,Japanese
Jess    Springfield, IL    English,French
Mike    Austin, TX    English,Perl,Java
[download]

ect...

I have written this very cute little program to let you find out who knows which language.

#!/opt/bin/perl -w
use strict;       # don't allow unsafe constructs

my ( $name, $city, $language, $search );
my $whole;
my $count = 1;
my $line;
my @matched;

print "What language would you like to search for? ";
$search = <STDIN>;
chomp $search;


#open the employees file
open (EMPLOYEES, "employees.txt");

#for each line
while ($line = <EMPLOYEES>) {

    #remove the carriage return
    chomp $line;

    #splits the line between tabs and get the different elements
    ($name, $city, $language) = split /\t/, $line;

next unless $language =~ /^$search/;

print "$name speaks $search\n";

}
close (EMPLOYEES);
[download]

The only problme is that right now it only works for the entry "English" because the other languages are buried English without spaces (only commas). What is the fastest way to parse the elements assigned to the $language $scaler?

Thanks for your time and any help offered.

Comment on A small comma parsing problem... Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: A small comma parsing problem... by davorg (Chancellor) on Oct 03, 2006 at 15:20 UTC
Use \b to match on word boundaries. `next unless $language =~ /\b$search\b/;` [download] -- <http://dave.org.uk> "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club." -- Chip Salzenberg	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: A small comma parsing problem... by chinamox (Scribe) on Oct 03, 2006 at 16:53 UTC
Thanks! Elegant and effective ...	[reply]
Re: A small comma parsing problem... by hgolden (Pilgrim) on Oct 03, 2006 at 15:23 UTC
Hey The problem isn't that the other languages are buried without spaces. The problem is that you've used the ^ metacharacter which means that the language has to be at the beginning of the string. If you remove that, the search will work (as long as you don't have the name of one language embedded in another).If you're worried about that, you can split the languages string by commas and search among the results, or set up a more complicated regular expression. Hays	[reply]
Re^2: A small comma parsing problem... by chinamox (Scribe) on Oct 03, 2006 at 16:19 UTC
smacks head Thank one of the hardest things for me with learning Perl is keeping an eye out for the small things...	[reply]
Re: A small comma parsing problem... by ikegami (Patriarch) on Oct 03, 2006 at 15:20 UTC
Some possibilities: `# Assumes $search matches /^\w/ and /\w\z/. next unless $language =~ /\b\Q$search\E\b/;` [download] `my @languages = split /,/, $language; next unless grep $_ eq $search, @languages;` [download] `my %languages = map { $_ => 1 } split /,/, $language; next unless $languages{$search};` [download] By the way, `$language` should probably be named `$languages`.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: A small comma parsing problem... by jdporter (Paladin) on Oct 03, 2006 at 15:37 UTC
See my solution to this other problem; it will work for this problem too - just rename a variable or two. We're building the house of the future together.	[reply]
Re^2: A small comma parsing problem... by chinamox (Scribe) on Oct 03, 2006 at 16:16 UTC
Thanks for the Pointer!	[reply]
Re: A small comma parsing problem... by Jasper (Chaplain) on Oct 03, 2006 at 16:04 UTC
Might I suggest that you check your data set? You have an american in there who knows a language other than English. Can that be right? BOOM BOOM!	[reply]
Re^2: A small comma parsing problem... by chinamox (Scribe) on Oct 03, 2006 at 16:14 UTC
I actually am American, and happen to live in Beijing. Been here for a few years, and speak Mandarin as well as the next Laowai...	[reply]