Spaces Between Chars While Reading File

Godsrock37 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello fellow perlmonks... I've got a simple one (i hope) today that i could use some help with if ur willing

I'm reading the contents of a file... which I've been doing the same way for months now...

say("Dequeuing ... ");
  my @lines = <MYQUEUE>;
  if (@lines){
    foreach my $line (@lines){
      #$line =~ s/"(.+)"/$1/gix;
      #say("$line \n");
      schedule($line);
      }
    $is_queued = 1;
    close (MYQUEUE);
    }
[download]

I changed the contents from url's on a single line to a part number on a single line... I read the file with excel 2007 and save it as a .txt and it looks fine to me in vi... but when i read it in it adds a space between EVERY two characters so "1071901" becomes "1 0 7 1 9 0 1"

Any thoughts?

Comment on Spaces Between Chars While Reading File Download Code

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Re: Spaces Between Chars While Reading File by massa (Hermit) on Aug 01, 2008 at 14:31 UTC
I would say you have an encoding problem (like your file is in UTF-16 encoding, and your program is garbling it). In vi, what is the encoding your file says it is? ("`:set fenc?`" will tell) if it really is utf-16 (or ucs-2, etc), the solution is to `binmode MYQUEUE, ':encoding(utf16)';` [download] before the read... []s, HTH, Massa (κς,πμ,πλ)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Spaces Between Chars While Reading File by Godsrock37 (Sexton) on Aug 04, 2008 at 15:47 UTC
The encoding was in fact usc-2... thank you very much sir I'll try the code included... thanks again	[reply]
Re: Spaces Between Chars While Reading File by igelkott (Priest) on Aug 01, 2008 at 13:33 UTC
Using ".+" in a regular expression is generally going to lead to trouble. Given the excel source and desired removal of quotes, it seems rather likely that you're reading from a CSV file. As such, you might consider using Text::CSV to save you from the complications of the format. Alternatively, you might even consider reading from the excel file directly with Spreadsheet::ParseExcel, though I must admit that I've never used it on 2007.	[reply]
Re^2: Spaces Between Chars While Reading File by almut (Canon) on Aug 01, 2008 at 13:47 UTC
Using ".+" in a regular expression is generally going to lead to trouble. Why is that (generally)? — I mean, it all depends on what you want to achieve, doesn't it?	[reply]
Re^3: Spaces Between Chars While Reading File by massa (Hermit) on Aug 01, 2008 at 14:35 UTC
"Greedily garble everything" is rarely what you want to achieve. In the OP case, it will change `"ab", "abc", "cde"` [download] into `ab", "abc", "cde` [download] which is (possibly) not the intended result. The ideal would be `s/"([^"]+)"/$1/g` [download] that would yield `ab, abc, cde` [download] []s, HTH, Massa (κς,πμ,πλ)	[reply] [d/l] [select]