Perl - file reading - got "GLOB" - perl

I am trying to read a simple text file.
After reading the whole file into an array or only the first line into a variable when I try to use it and print out the value read text I get the following results:
GLOB(0x1234567)
I tried to read the whole file:
open(my $fh,'<','/path/to/file.txt') or die "Can't open data";
#lines = <$fh>;
close($fh);
print #lines;
#Results in a single "GLOB(0x1234567)" line
Or reading the file line by line:
open(my $fh,'<','/path/to/file.txt') or die "Can't open data";
while (my $line = <$fh>) {
print $line;
#Results in a single "GLOB(0x1234567)" line
}
close($fh);
The file has proper permissions, proper encoding (is UTF-8 ok?).
I think maybe it is an environment related issue because if I create a completely empty Perl script with only the lines mentioned above, the file reading works.
Thanks for your time! ;-)

The most likely cause is you forgetting the < >:
my $line = $fh; # wrong
my #lines = $fh; # wrong
Better:
my $line = <$fh>; # reads a line
my #lines = <$fh>; # reads all lines
Alternatively, you might have done one of the following things:
my $line = <$ fh>; # parses as glob($fh), not readline($fh)
my $line = <${fh}>; # also means glob($fh)
my $line = <$handles[$i]>; # glob($handles[$i])
Basically, if you're using <foo> where foo is anything but a dollar sign immediately followed by an identifier and nothing else, it is treated as a glob operation, not a readline.
Best solution:
my $line = readline $fh;
my #lines = readline $fh;
I like the last version best because
readline isn't syntactically overloaded like < > is, so the code is unambiguous.
readline tells you what it does: It reads a line (or a list of lines).
It's harder to accidentally omit.

Related

Search for multiple terms in perl

I have a file with more than hundred single column entries. I need to search for each of these entries into a file of multiple column and more than thousand entries and need a output file. I tried these codes:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
print "Enter the input file name:";
my $inputfile = <STDIN>;
chomp($inputfile);
print "\nEnter the search file name:";
my $searchfile=<STDIN>;
chomp($searchfile);
open (INPUTFILE, $inputfile) || die;
open (SEARCHFILE, $searchfile) || die;
open (OUT, ">write.txt") || die;
while (my $line=<SEARCHFILE>){
while (<INPUTFILE>) {
if (/$line/){
print OUT $_;
}
}
}
close (INPUTFILE) || die;
close (SEARCHFILE) || die;
close (OUT) || die;
The output file has only one line. It has searched the term from the search file into input file, but only for the first term, not for all. Please help!
When you read INPUTFILE in the inner loop, it's read to the end during the first round of SEARCHFILE. Because it's not reset, the filehandle is used up and will always return eof.
If there are hundreds of lines, but not several 100,000 you can easily read it into an array first and then use that for the lookup. The fact that it's single-column makes that very easy. Note that this is less efficient then the alternative solution below.
chomp( my #needles = <SEARCHFILE> );
while (<INPUTFILE>) {
foreach my $needle (#needles) {
print OUT $_ if m/\Q$needle\E/; # \Q end \E quote regex meta chars
}
}
Alternatively you can also build one large lookup regex that matches all the strings in one go. That is probably faster than iterating the array for each line.
# open ...
chomp( my #needles = <SEARCHFILE> );
my $lookup = join '|', map quotemeta, #needles;
my $lookup_regex = qr/$lookup/; # possibly with /i?
while (my $line = <INPUTFILE>) {
print OUT $line if $line =~ $lookup_regex;
}
The quotemeta takes care of strings that contain regex meta characters like / or | or even .. It's the same as using \Q and \E as above.
Please also use three-argument-open and named filehandles.
open my $fh_searchfile, '<', $searchfile or die $!;
open my $fh_inputfile, '<', $inputfile or die $!;
open my $fh_out, '>', 'write.txt' or die $!;
chomp( my #needles = <$fh_searchfile> );
# ...
The three-argument-open is important because you are taking user input and using it as the filename directly. A malicious user could enter something like | rm -rf *, which would open a pipe to a delete all my files without asking program. Oops. But if you specify the '<' read open method explicitly in its own parameter, the method characters are ignored in the third param.
The lexical filehandle $fh is, as the name says, lexical, while INPUTFILE is a GLOB, which makes it global. That's not so bad if you only have this one script and no modules, but as soon as you deal with different packages it becomes problematic because those are super-global and every part of the program sees them. That can lead to name collisions and weird stuff happening.

Need to replace value from one file to another file using perl

I am writing a program using perl which read a value from one file and replace this value in other file. Program runs successfully, but value didn't get replaced. Please suggest me where is the error.
use strict;
use warnings;
open(file1,"address0.txt") or die "Cannot open file.\n";
my $value;
$value=<file1>;
system("perl -p -i.bak -e 's/add/$value/ig' rough.sp");
Here the value which I want to replace exists in address0.txt file. It is a single value 1. I want to place this value in place of add in other file rough.sp.
My rough.sp looks like
Vdd 1 0 add
My address0.txt looks like
1
So output should be like
Vdd 1 0 1
Please help me out. Thanks in advance
Assuming that there is a 1:1 relationship between lines in adress0.txt and rough.sp, you can proceed like this:
use strict;
use warnings;
my ($curline_1,$curline_2);
open(file1, "address0.txt") or die "Cannot open file.\n";
open(file2, "rough.sp") or die "Cannot open file.\n";
open(file3, ">out.sp") or die "Cannot open file.\n";
while (<file1>) {
$curline_1 = $_;
chomp($curline_1);
$curline_2 = <file2>;
$curline_2 =~ s/ add/ $curline_1/;
print file3 $curline_2;
}
close(file1);
close(file2);
close(file3);
exit(0);
Explanation:
The code iterates through the lines of your input files in parallel. Note that the lines read include the line terminator. Line contents from the 'address' file are taken as replacement values fpr the add literal in your .sp file. Line terminators from the 'address' file are eliminated to avoid introducing additional newlines.
Addendum:
An extension for multi-replacements might look like this:
$curline_1 = $_;
chomp($curline_1);
my #parts = split(/ +/, $curline_1); # splits the line from address0.txt into an array of strings made up of contiguous non-whitespace chars
$curline_2 = <file2>;
$curline_2 =~ s/ add/ $parts[0]/;
$curline_2 =~ s/ sub/ $parts[1]/;
# ...

Read file from STDIN and write to STDOUT

I want to read html files entered from STDIN perform some function and then write another html file to STDOUT. My problem is I have to give file in the stated manner. I have tried many things but nothing is working good. Nothing is getting printed
my command line prompt
perl universe.pl<sun.html>galaxy.html
my code -
open(my $in, "<&STDIN") or die "Can't dup STDIN: $!";
open(my $out, ">&STDOUT") or die "Can't dup STDOUT: $!";
my #lines = <$in>;
foreach(#lines) {
push(#newlines,$_);
say "Lines pushing:", $_;
}
You don't need to open STDIN or STDOUT; they're always ready opened.
You don't need to slurp the whole file into memory as you do with:
my #lines = <$in>;
You never use $out which should be indicative of a problem.
while (<>)
{
print mapping_func($_);
}
where mapping_func() is your function that does the relevant transform on its input string and returns the mapped result:
sub mapping_func
{
my($string) = #_;
$string =~ s/html/HTML/gi;
return $string;
}
Using the magic diamond operator <>, you will able to do what you asked. But please to provide some more search efforts next time.
use strict; use warnings;
while (my $line = <>) {
# do something with $line
}
Last but not least; if you have to parse HTML the good way, have a look to HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath or just HTML::TreeBuilder
I had this problem with a script which was run from inside another Perl script.
The solution was to set $| in the second script (the one which executes the script which reads from STDIN).

perl print only the last line of the array

I am trying to print the array but the out put contain only the last line of the array. the partial code is as follow.
open OUT, "> /myFile.txt"
or die "Couldn't open output file: $!";
foreach (#result) {
print OUT;
}
the out put is
List Z
which is the last line, but when I do print "#result" the out put is
List A
List B
List C so on...
I am little bit confuse why the results are different on the same array.
Working on a hunch, I tried adding \r to the end of your input lines, and sure enough, it creates the illusion that only the last line of your input is printed to the file. Here's the code to test it:
use strict;
use warnings;
my #result = map "$_\r", 'A' .. 'Z';
open (OUT, "> myFile.txt") or die("Couldn't open output file: $!");
foreach (#result) {
print OUT ;
}
What you have probably done is performed chomp on lines from a file from a different operating system (DOS, Windows), which does not strip the \r line endings. Hence, when the lines are printed, the lines overwrite each other.
If this is what is wrong, the solution is to use the dos2unix tool to fix your files, or to use:
s/\s+\z//;
to strip your newlines.
You may inspect your input by using the Data::Dumper module, using the option Useqq, e.g.:
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1;
print Dumper \#result;
If these whitespace characters are in your output, they will then be visible.
the problem is here
open OUT, "> /myFile.txt"
this should be
open OUT, ">>", "/myfile.txt"
What you wrote overwrites the entire file for each iteration of the foreach(#result) loop.
What you are intending to do is append to it (">>").
">>" appends, ">" overwrites.
Also take note of how i broke ">> /myfile.txt" into ">>", "/myfile.txt".
This is both more secure, and more robust for less specific applications of open.
Foreign line terminators from any platform can easily be fixed by clearing whitespace from the end of the line and adding it back when printing it
Like this
open my $out, '>', '/myFile.txt' or die "Couldn't open output file: $!";
foreach (#result) {
s/\s+$//;
print $out "$_\n";
}
or
foreach my $line (#result) {
$line =~ s/\s+$//;
print $out "$line\n";
}

How do I read the contents of a small text file into a scalar in Perl?

I have a small text file that I'd like to read into a scalar variable exactly as it is in the file (preserving line separators and other whitespace).
The equivalent in Python would be something like
buffer = ""
try:
file = open("fileName", 'rU')
try:
buffer += file.read()
finally:
file.close()
except IOError:
buffer += "The file could not be opened."
This is for simply redisplaying the contents of the file on a web page, which is why my error message is going into my file buffer.
From the Perl Cookbook:
my $filename = 'file.txt';
open( FILE, '<', $filename ) or die 'Could not open file: ' . $!;
undef $/;
my $whole_file = <FILE>;
I would localize the changes though:
my $whole_file = '';
{
local $/;
$whole_file = <FILE>;
}
As an alternative to what Alex said, you can install the File::Slurp module (cpan -i File::Slurp from the command line) and use this:
use File::Slurp;
# Read data into a variable
my $buffer = read_file("fileName");
# or read data into an array
my #buffer = read_file("fileName");
Note that this dies (well... croaks, but that's just the proper way to call die from a module) on errors, so you may need to run this in an eval block to catch any errors.
If I don't have Slurp or Perl6::Slurp near by then I normally go with....
open my $fh, '<', 'file.txt' or die $!;
my $whole_file = do { local $/; <$fh> };
There is a discussion of the various ways to read a file here.
I don't have enough reputation to comment, so I apologize for making this another post.
# Harold Bamford: $/ should not be an obscure variable to a Perl programmer. A beginner may not know it, but he or she should learn it. The join method is a poor choice for the reasons stated in the article linked by hackingwords above. Here's the relevant quotation from the article:
That needlessly splits the input file into lines (join provides a list context to ) and then joins up those lines again. The original coder of this idiom obviously never read perlvar and learned how to use $/ to allow scalar slurping.
You could do something like:
$data_file="somefile.txt";
open(DAT, $data_file);
#file_data = <DAT>;
close(DAT);
That'll give you the file contents in an array, that you can use for whatever you want, for example, if you wanted each individual line, you could do something like:
foreach $LINE (#file_data)
{
dosomethingwithline($LINE);
}
For a full usage example:
my $result;
$data_file = "somefile.txt";
my $opened = open(DAT, $data_file);
if (!$opened)
{
$result = "Error.";
}
else
{
#lines = <DAT>;
foreach $LINE (#lines)
{
$result .= $LINE;
}
close(DAT);
}
Then you can use $result however you need. Note: This code is untested, but it should give you an idea.
I'd tweak draegtun's answer like this, to make it do exactly what was being asked:
my $buffer;
if ( open my $fh, '<', 'fileName' ) {
$buffer = do { local $/; <$fh> };
close $fh;
} else {
$buffer = 'The file could not be opened.';
}
Just join all lines together into a string:
open(F, $file) or die $!;
my $content = join("", <F>);
close F;
(It was previously suggested to use join "\n" but that will add extra newlines. Each line already has a newline at its end when it's read.)