I thought I understood the problem at hand. :-) Anyway, I'm here to learn and I'm the first one to admit that I lack PERL finess and technique to solve some of the problems I encounter. Also, I have to admit that 'hashes' are not the strongest suite of my skills in PERL right now (I'm still not too comfortable with them, although, I can see a huge benifit by mastering them). Having said that, this is why I chose array approach and line by line comparison. Let's see if my thinking in doing so was flawed:

Inner file:

Consists roughly of 154 records. If I could match 154 against outer file, I would be very happy.

Outter file:

Consists of about 256 records which contain various info about a user

Those two files are comma delimited and have some other info than names as well. They very in their field number.

Problem:

The only thing these two files have in common are some similarities in their names. To make things more difficult, the inner file is maintained manually so a human error factor has to be taken into account. Also, the outter file name might also have a middle name.

To make sure that I can achieve the maximum number of hits, I split the names of the inner file into:

lastname substr[$firstname, 0, 2]
[download]

so I can catch:

• Smith Steve
• Smith Stephan

but not

• Smith Agnes
• Smith John
• Smith Adam

and so on.

Sudo code:

Only important elements are left below to make it short:

@file1 = <PHONEBOOK>;
@file2 = <MATCHED>;

foreach (@file1) {
    @record = split(',', $_); # so I can get name only
    $fullname = tr/()//d; # I don't want ( or ) in it
    $fullname = s/\s+/ /g; # Substitute one or more spaces anywhere wi
+th one space only (per space matched)
    # Now, I have $fullname with info I want to match against.

    foreach (file2) {
        @fileds = split(',', $_); # to get name only
        my ($lname, $fname) = split(/\s+/, $fields[5]); # so I can do 
+a substring on the first name
        my $name = "$lname " . substr($fname, 0, 2);
        $name =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/; # You can tell me to use uc() function b
+ut for now I will use what I know

        if ($fullname =~ m/^$name/g) {
            # at this point if a string from my inner loop matches the
+ one from the outter, print it out
        }
    }
}
[download]

So, in theory this code should work (I know it should because it was working at some point) and from what I wrote above, doesn't it look like I understand what I want to do?

Using hashes here would be nice if each file only had one elment per line where an element from line 1 in outter file would be a key for a value of element from line 1 in the inner file, which is not the case here.

---

In reply to Re: Re: Comparing two files by bman
in thread Comparing two files by bman

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