text file parsing with chomp

fjdb3 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Noble Perl Monks,

I am a newbie to PERL but have a script that parses a tab delimited text file, and creates multiple text files from it, based upon the first 5 characters found in each line.

What I am trying to figure out is whether there is a way to ignore the first 5 characters in each line when I write each line from the source file into the appropriate log file.

The code that writes the data in the corresponding log is:

open(LOG, "$file");


while (<LOG>) {

chomp($_);

(@data)  = split(/\t/, $_);

(@zip)   = split(//, $data[0]);


$string  = "";

for ($i=0; $i<=4; $i++) {

# $string .= "$zip[$i]";

$string .= "substr($data[0], 7, 500)";
}

#

# match 1st 5 with the zip file

#

if ($z eq $string) {

print NEW "$_\n";

}


}

close(LOG);
[download]

This code works but includes the first 5 characters which were use to determine the appropriate LOG to write the line to.

Thanks in advance for your noble assistance!

Comment on text file parsing with chomp Download Code

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Re: text file parsing with chomp by toolic (Bishop) on Aug 12, 2009 at 20:21 UTC
If you want to get the 1st 5 characters of a string, use substr: `my $string = substr($data[0], 0, 5);` [download] If this does not answer your question, please: Enclose your code in 'code' tags (see Writeup Formatting Tips). Show a small sample of input data. Show a small sample of output data.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: text file parsing with chomp by ig (Vicar) on Aug 13, 2009 at 01:22 UTC
It appears you are printing your output with `print NEW "$_\n";` [download] If you want to print all but the first five characters of $_ you could change this to `print NEW substr($_,5),"\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: text file parsing with chomp by jethro (Monsignor) on Aug 12, 2009 at 21:02 UTC
Removing the first 5 chars from a $string: `substr($string,0,5)='';` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: text file parsing with chomp by jwkrahn (Abbot) on Aug 12, 2009 at 21:08 UTC
Or alternatively: `substr $string, 0, 5, '';` [download]	[reply] [d/l]