nimajneb, try something like this:
### Always use strict =) use strict; ### Set up a hash table ("associative array") to associate ### numbers with names my %totals; ### Open the file open my $fIN, "<msgcount.txt"; ### Read through the file line by line. Inside the loop, the ### special variable $_ will refer to the "current line" and ### this loop will move to the next line in turn with each ### loop iteration. It will quit when it runs out of file to read. ### ### I'll define some regexp patterns here, but you could do it ### all at once, of course. I'm only splitting it here to make ### the code in the loop more readable. my $date = '\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d'; ### Matches MM/DD/YYYY my $name = '\w+'; ### Matches any number of a-z, A-Z, or _ my $count = '\d+'; ### Matches any number of digits. while( <$fIN> ) { ### We only care about this line if it's our special format. This ### will ignore lines that don't have valid data, such as blanks ### trailing blank lines in the file or something. ### matches 01/03/2008 yasmin 67 if( $_ =~ /($date) ($name) ($count)/ ) { ### The parenthases above captured the data in this line (if ### applicable). Now we can access the first, second, and third ### matches: my $this_date = $1; ### The first () field my $this_name = $2; ### The second () field my $this_count = $3; ### The third () field ### Do one thing if the user already has data, and something ### else if not. if( not exists $totals{$this_name} ) { ### If this person isn't already in the hash, add her with ### this data. $totals{$this_name} = $this_count; } else { ### This person is already in the hash, so just add to the ### existing totals count. $totals{$this_name} += $this_count; } } } ### Don't forget to close your file. close $fIN; ### That's it! Now you've got a hash full of your data (garaunteed ### not to have duplicates =) Now you can access someone's ### data directly: print 'yasmin has ' . $totals{'yasmin'} . ' posts.'; ### or with a loop foreach my $username (keys(%totals)) { print "User $username has " . $totals{$username} . " posts.\n"; }
That could all be done in a much more compact manner, but that makes it harder to learn at first, of course =)
For information about hashes using hashes in perl, do a google search for "perl hash tutorial". (here).
For information about capturing data as I did above (called "regular expressions") check out the Perl Regular Expressions documentation page.
Hope it helps!
In reply to Re: Parsing a text file
by sirrobert
in thread Parsing a text file
by nimajneb
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