in reply to Recommendations for breaking up string?

A dreadful program that works ... for those of you who think I can’t write (bad ...) Perl code: 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = "QB Carson Palmer RB Chris Ivory RB Eddie Lacy WR A.J. Green
+ WR John Brown WR Davante Adams TE Martellus Bennett FLEX Jeremy Hill
+ DST Panthers";

my $key = undef;
my $result = {};

for my $wd (split(/\b(QB|RB|WR|TE|FLEX|DST)\b/,$str)) {

  # As writ, "split()" will return the key followed by the string
  # for that key.  We abuse "defined($key)" to separate the two.
  # Probably awful way to do it but it works.

  # '$result' has a hash-bucket for each key and an array-of-strings
  # for the content of the bucket.  Perl's "auto-vivification"
  # makes this easy, if cryptic, to write.  (If a bucket does not yet
  # exist, it magically appears.)

  # The following statement is a further smelly hack.
  # (The first string returned is empty.)
  next if $wd eq "";

print "wd $wd\n";
  if (defined($key)) {
    push @{$result->{$key}}, $wd;
    $key = undef;
  } 
  else {
    $key = $wd;
  }
}

foreach my $k (keys $result) {
  print "$k is: " . join(", ", @{$result->{$k}}) . "\n";
}

[download]

It does not update a database, of course, and you will also notice that it stacks any number of (say ...) RB entries into a list, instead of distinguishing between RB1 and RB2 (or assuming there are only two).   Probably the only saving grace of it, if any, is the use of split with a particular regular-expression.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: Recommendations for breaking up string?
by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Sep 16, 2015 at 20:53 UTC

    A extractive variation. This approach assumes that a position ('QB', 'RB', etc.) cannot be confused with the second or any subsequent field of a player's name. 

    c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -MData::Dump -le
"my $str = 'QB Carson Palmer RB Chris Ivory RB Eddie Lacy WR A. J. Gre
+en '
         . 'WR John Brown  WR WR Grace  WR Pele TE Billy Bob Bennett '
         . 'FLEX   A.P. Hill   DST   Panthers';
 print qq{[[$str]]};
 ;;
 my $result = {};
 ;;
 my $position = qr{ \b (?: QB | RB | WR | TE | FLEX | DST) \b }xms;
 my $player   = qr{ \S+ (?: \s+ \S+)*? }xms;
 ;;
 while ($str =~ m{ ($position) \s+ ($player) (?= \s+ $position | \z) }
+xmsg) {
   ;;
   my ($posn, $name) = ($1, $2);
   ;;
   push @{$result->{$posn}}, $name;
   ;;
   }
 ;;
 dd $result;
"
[[QB Carson Palmer RB Chris Ivory RB Eddie Lacy WR A. J. Green WR John
+ Brown  WR WR Grace  WR Pele TE Billy Bob Bennett FLEX   A.P. Hill   
+DST   Panthers]]
{
  DST  => ["Panthers"],
  FLEX => ["A.P. Hill"],
  QB   => ["Carson Palmer"],
  RB   => ["Chris Ivory", "Eddie Lacy"],
  TE   => ["Billy Bob Bennett"],
  WR   => ["A. J. Green", "John Brown", "WR Grace", "Pele"],
}

    [download]
    The  $player regex could be refined to make it more discriminative of human names, but that's always tricky.

    Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom