Code tags are your friends: see Markup in the Monastery.

Try using sprintf to format your output (e.g. sprintf "%.3f"). That will generate a formatted string you can feed to a print statement.

An example of how to parse a csv (comma separated values) file is at http://www.biterscripting.com/Download/SS_CSV.txt . I have been using it. Seems good. Their scripts are open source and free at http://biterscripting.com . Don't even have to provide an email.

my @columns = map { sprintf("%.3f", $_) } $csv->fields();
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In order to start programming defensive and safe, don't use the diamond for CSV

use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::CSV;

my ($file, output) = ("112008.csv", "112008.txt");

my $csv = Text::CSV->new ({ binary => 1 });

open my $ih, "<", $file   or die "Can't open in  file $file: $!";
open my $oh, ">", $output or die "Can't open out file $output: $!";

while (my $row = $csv->getline ($ih)) {
    my @columns = map { sprintf "%.3f", $_ } @$row;
    # do something with @columns
    print { $oh } join "|", @columns, "\n";
    }

$csv->eof () or $csv->error_diag ();
close $ih or die "$file: $!";
close $oh or die "$output: $!";
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Greetings. What exactly is wrong with using the diamond operator here? What specifically makes it unsafe, and why is using your method considered "better defense?" Thanks.

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

Short answer: nested newlines

Longer answer: Though in the case of the OP, there are no embedded newlines or other binary characters, it's just waiting for it to happen one day or another when new fields are added to the end. CSV is safe and defined enough to cope, but if the diamond is used to read CSV (in general), all lines that have embedded newlines will cause the CSV parsing to fail from that point on.

Note that the $csv->getline () will use the diamond (CORE's getline ()) internally too, but Text::CSV (and Text::CSV_XS and Text::CSV_PP) will know internally that the line might not be finished and will correct that on a need-to-be basis.

Another reason to use getline () instead of diamond, is that the getline () is magnitudes faster than the combination of diamond + parse (), even when using Text::CSV_PP.


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

The first bit of help is to see Markup in the Monastery and use <code> tags so the code is readable. Like:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::CSV;

my $file = '112008.csv';
my $output='112008.txt';

my $csv = Text::CSV->new();

open (CSV, "<", $file) or die $!;
open(OUTFILE,">$output") || die "Can't open file $output";


while (<CSV>) {
    if ($csv->parse($_)) {
        my @columns = $csv->fields();
        printf OUTFILE "@columns\n";
    } else {
        my $err = $csv->error_input;
        print "Failed to parse line: $err";
    }
}

close CSV;
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Lot easier to read and comment on then.

I find formats to be very handy in some situations.

And here's an article with some more information on them.

Basically, you can define fields with set widths and fixed characters, and your variables are displayed as indicated by the format you define. Depending on what you plan to do with your output, this might be useful.

It will track pages if you define the number of lines per page and define page headers, but you can set the settings so that no headers will be printed.