parsing newlines, tabs and other delimiters from an ascii file

[subzero82]

Please forgive me for this qestion. I am a newbie and I wrote a script that is supposed to take an exported ascii file that contains a delimited list of id numbers, then cut out all the delimiters (these can include ,.;:|, newlines and tabs) and then it takes a substr of the id number (so if the file contains 1234, 2345 the results could be 23, 34). The issue is I cannot figure out how to split tas and newlines. I ave included the code below. Any help is greatly appreciated.

print "Please choose path to your ascii file:\n";
$ascii_path = <STDIN>;
chomp $ascii_path;

print &quot;\n\nPlease choose a starting character postion:&quot;;
$start_char = <STDIN>;
chomp $start_char;

print &quot;\n\nHow long should your finished string be...:&quot;;
$string_length = <STDIN>;
chomp $string_length;

$ascii_file = $ascii_path;

open(FILE1, $ascii_file);
while (<FILE1>)
{
chomp;
@LOAD1 = split(/\n/);
};
close(FILE1);

open(FILE2, &quot;>$ascii_file new&quot;
foreach $LOAD1 (@LOAD1)
{
chomp $LOAD1;
print FILE2 (substr(&quot;$LOAD1&quot;,($start_char-1),$string_length)).&quot;,\n&quot;;
};

print &quot;\n@LOAD1&quot;;

<STDIN>;

 

[hmerrill]

Here's the split:

my @tokens = split /[,\.;:\|\t\n]/, $text;

By putting the delimiters in square brackets, you are saying split on any one of these - I escaped the dot and pipe.

Here's a short script that shows it:

---------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @tokens = ();

### that's a tab between o and p, and a newline after r
my $text = &quot;abc.def;ghi:jkl|mno pqr
stu&quot;;

my @tokens = split /[,\.;:\|\t\n]/, $text;

my $ct = 0;
foreach (@tokens) {
$ct++;
print &quot;token $ct = <$_>\n&quot;;
}

---------------------------------------

Read up on split by doing &quot;perldoc -f split&quot; in *nix - not sure how to do that in Windows.

HTH.
Hardy Merrill
Mission Critical Linux, Inc.

http://www.missioncriticallinux.com

 

[subzero82]

First...thanks for the response. I appreciae t and if you ever need a hand with Oracle you can buzz me anytime. The issue is that I have used your example, which works like a charm, however in this situation I cannot get all the values loaded into my array. What happens is this... The ascii file comes out like this:

345671,
125783,
092718,
152618,

When I run my code I only get the first number as output. When I substitute your code it is the same thing. I tried to read the file into one big string and then split it but that doesn't work either. I am sure that I am missing something small and stupid. Any ideas?