in reply to Re: Multiple choice from text file to SQL
in thread Multiple Line Data from text file to SQL

Hi,

Thanks for your advice and sorry for posting something already asked. The post you referenced in your reply was very helpful. But some darkness remains in my DBA's brain.

Here is the code I've done: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
$file = "data.txt";
open (INPUT, "< $file");
undef $/;
my $string = <INPUT>;
$string =~ s/\n//g;
while ($string =~ /A\)(.*?)B\)/g) {
        print "<a>".$1."</a>\n";
}
close (INPUT);

[download]

This prints out all the occurrences of the A)... as expected

Thanks again for your precious knowledge.

P.

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Re^3: Multiple choice from text file to SQL
by kennethk (Abbot) on Mar 03, 2009 at 21:24 UTC

    Why limit your code to one match at a time? As long as you are capturing things, you can use 1 regex to extract all the details from a question at once. If your questions are separated by a blank line (i.e. end marked by "\n\n"), you could try something like:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $file = "data.txt";
open (INPUT, "< $file");
undef $/;
my $string = <INPUT>;
while ($string =~ /(\d+)\.\n(.+?)A\)(.+?)B\)(.+?)C\)(.+?)D\)(.+?)(\n\n
+|$)/sg) {
    my @captures = ($1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6);
    foreach (@captures) {
        s/\n//g;
    }
    print "<QN>$captures[0]</QN>\n";
    print "<QQ>$captures[1]</QQ>\n";
    print "<Aa>$captures[2]</Aa>\n";
    print "<Ab>$captures[3]</Ab>\n";
    print "<Ac>$captures[4]</Ac>\n";
    print "<Ad>$captures[5]</Ad>\n";
}
close (INPUT);

    [download]

    Some side notes: you should use strict; use warnings in your scripts since they'll help prevent typos from causing you incredible misery. You should use 3-argument open in place of the 2-argument form you used - 3-argument has some important security implications.

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