Creating filenames

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

Monks, I'm using the following to create filenames. I was originally grabbing the first 3 words of the title but for SEO reasons, I want to grab the entire title, no matter how long. I commented out the 3 and made it 12, but now I end up with titles that have trailing dashes. If the title is 3 words long, I get a title separated by dashes, with 9 trailing dashes at the end. Where am I going wrong?

       @words = split (/ /, $titleclean);
        $filename = $year."-".$mon;
        #for ($i=0; $i<3; $i++) {
        for ($i=0; $i<12; $i++) {
            $filename = $filename."-".$words[$i];
        }
        $filename = $filename.".html";
[download]

Thanks. UPDATE: I ended up doing this. Is there a better way?

    $filename =~ s/ /-/gi;
    $filename =~ s/--//gi;
    $filename =~ s/-\.html/\.html/gi;
[download]

Comment on Creating filenames Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Creating filenames by roboticus (Chancellor) on Apr 02, 2012 at 19:57 UTC
htmanning: What you're doing wrong is assuming that all titles are going to have 12 words. Instead, try this: `@words = split / /, $titleclean; $filename = "$year-$mon-" . join("-",@words) . ".html";` [download] The join bit in the middle tells perl to string @words together with a dash between each one. ...roboticus When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Creating filenames by JavaFan (Canon) on Apr 02, 2012 at 20:51 UTC
I'd write the last statement as: `$filename = join "-", $year, $mon, @words; $filename .= ".html";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Creating filenames by roboticus (Chancellor) on Apr 02, 2012 at 23:15 UTC
JavaFan: Yes, that's much cleaner than mine. ...roboticus When your only tool is join, all problems become a matter of selecting the proper delimiter.	[reply]
Re^2: Creating filenames by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2012 at 20:04 UTC
roboticus solution is far better than my suggestion. But it does give me the excuse for a tangential observation: If your titles contain as many as 12 words (and some of them are l...o...o...n...g words) you're going to end up with a `$filename` that's terribly long -- if they average 4 chars per word and you're using a four digit year and a three letter month, that's a filename nearly 70 chars long (and heaven knows what a full path might look like).	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Creating filenames by htmanning (Friar) on Apr 02, 2012 at 20:19 UTC
Thanks. This works, but @ww makes a good point that I should count the number of words, stick it in a variable, then the loop doesn't have to go around 12 times. This seems to work: `@words = split (/ /, $titleclean); $numwords+=@words; $filename = $year."-".$mon; for ($i=0; $i<$numwords; $i++) { $filename = "$year-$mon-" . join("-",@words) . ".html"; }` [download] Look okay?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^3: Creating filenames by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2012 at 20:23 UTC
No. roboticus way goes around only as many times as there are words in the title.	[reply]
Re^4: Creating filenames by htmanning (Friar) on Apr 02, 2012 at 20:51 UTC
Re: Creating filenames by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 02, 2012 at 19:57 UTC
You probably want to use a variable whose value is the number of elements in `@words` for the max (rather than the hard-coded '12'). As you've written it now, your `for` loop cycles 12 times (regardless of how many words were found in the title) and when `$words[i]` is empty, you get the trailing hyphens.	[reply] [d/l] [select]