Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful.

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

I am attempting to read a file in which each string is formatted this way:

DB<27> x @a1

0 "2011-07-06 15:50:28\cI0.050\cM\cJ"

in the debugger. All I want, in reality, is the value that shows as 0.050 in the example. It shows as all white space, aside from the date, time, and value when the file is output via 'cat'. I can slurp the file easily enough, but I can't find a way to get that value.

A bit more information is that the file was created on a Windows 2008 server. I am attempting to process it on a linux machine.

Comment on Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful.

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Re: Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful. by derby (Abbot) on Jul 21, 2011 at 21:57 UTC
\cI is the tab character and \cM\cJ is the dos newline. So ... splitting on whitespace and taking the third value should work. `my $value = (split( /\s+/, $a1[0] ))[2]` [download] -derby	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful. by jwkrahn (Abbot) on Jul 22, 2011 at 01:41 UTC
splitting on whitespace and taking the third value should work. `my $value = (split( /\s+/, $a1[0] ))[2]` Unless there is leading whitespce. This will work in either case: `my $value = ( split ' ', $a1[ 0 ] )[ 2 ];` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful. by derby (Abbot) on Jul 22, 2011 at 01:43 UTC
true ... true .. but there's no leading whitespace in the OP. -derby	[reply]
Re^2: Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful. by trailhounds (Initiate) on Jul 21, 2011 at 22:27 UTC
Derby, Thanks for your answer. Will the linux perl interpret the whitespace from Windows correctly? My test did not work. It keeps coming back when I show the value in the interpreter as "undef".	[reply]
Re^3: Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful. by derby (Abbot) on Jul 22, 2011 at 01:42 UTC
Whitespace is whitespace. Windows nor linux should matter (granted the eol delimiter is different but they're both whitespace). I'm guessing there's more to the code and/or data than the snippet you've shown. If you could give more details for 'It keeps coming back when I show the value in the interpreter as "undef"', we could track down the issue. -derby	[reply]
Re^3: Attempt to parse a line with odd characters is unsuccessful. by cdarke (Prior) on Jul 22, 2011 at 07:11 UTC
Check the input file really is what you expect with something like `od -xc file.txt`	[reply] [d/l]