in reply to Need help to make correction in a perl script

I have used perltidy to improve the layout of your script, added a missing curly bracket at the end and added strict and warnings, which you should always do yourself, unless you have a very good reason not to. You can read more about these options in Use strict and warnings.

Here is your modified code:

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

my $found_f = 0;
my ( $lastline, $line );
open( INPUTFILE, "test.txt" );

while (<INPUTFILE>) {
    chomp;

    if (/^[A-Z]{2}:\s/) {
        $lastline = $line;
        $line     = $_;
        $found_f  = 1;
    } elsif ( !/^[A-Z]{2}:\s/ && $found_f ) {
        s/^ {4}/ /;
        $line .= $_;
        next;
    } elsif (/^$/) {
        $lastline = ' ';
        $found_f  = 0;
    }
    print "$lastline\n";
}

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To understand why the LA field is not being printed, you need to think about what happens in the last iteration through your loop. When the last line of your data is read, which branch of your if statement is taken? What happens in that branch? After reading the last line of the file, is your loop block executed again? If not, how can the last value of $lastline be printed?

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Re^2: Need help to make correction in a perl script
by srsahu75 (Initiate) on Mar 20, 2009 at 11:18 UTC
    Thanks for the try and suggestions. I can understand that since the last input $_ is not starting with ^A-Z{2}:\s hence it is not taking the last field. I am not able to visualize, how to do that. I need the out put like this: 
    DN: Data Name Aquatic Sciences
TI: Title Distribution and abundance of bound volumes of the file in i
+nstitute 1978
AU: Author Sahu, SR; Gawas, AKG
AF: Affiliation Inst. of document scanning and documentation profiling
+ at library, toward the prograssive society and establishment
SO: Source Test document file. Vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-14. Jul 1990.
DE: Descriptors Article Subject Terms: Abundance; Ecological distribut
+ion; Geographical distribution; Life cycle; Zooplankton; Article Taxo
+nomic Terms: Euphausia; Article Geographic Terms: ISW,
LA: Language English

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      Like so many things, the solution is easy to understand once you know it but difficult to see when you don't know where to look.

      Your program reads the last two lines and copies them into your variable $line but it exits without ever printing the contents of this variable. All you have to do is print the contents of this variable after reading the last line of the file.

      Your loop terminates after reading the last line of the file. Therefore, to print the contents of $line after reading the last line of the file, you need to add a print statement after your loop.

      Your program is otherwise a bit more complex than it needs to be. Here is a simplified version, with a final print added, to print that troublesome last line.

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

my $line;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;

    if (/^$/) {
        print "\n";
        $line = "";
    } elsif (/^[A-Z]{2}:\s/) {
        print "$line\n" if($line);
        $line     = $_;
    } else {
        $line .= " $_";
    }
}

print "$line\n" if($line);

__DATA__
DN: Data Name
Information Sciences
TI: Title
Distribution and abundance of bound volumes of the file in institute
shelves from 1978
AU: Author
Sahu, SR; Gawas, AKG
AF: Affiliation
Inst. of document scanning and documentation profiling at library,
toward the prograssive society and establishment
SO: Source
Test document file. Vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 1-14. Jul 1990.
DE: Descriptors
Article Subject Terms: Abundance; Ecological distribution;
Geographical distribution; Life cycle; Zooplankton; Article Taxonomic
Terms: Euphausia; Article Geographic Terms: ISW,
LA: Language
English

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
      What is not coming? Is there a blank line at the end of the file that is not printing or are you expecting a value of some kind to print at the end when the file has been output?
[reply]

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