Using Perl to find and fix errors in CSV files - perl

Question

I am dealing with very large amounts of data. Every now and then there is a slip up. I want to identify each row with an error, under a condition of my choice. With that I want the row number along with the line number of each erroneous row. I will be running this script on a handful of files and I will want to output the report to one.
So here is my example data:
File_source,ID,Name,Number,Date,Last_name
1.csv,1,Jim,9876,2014-08-14,Johnson
1.csv,2,Jim,9876,2014-08-14,smith
1.csv,3,Jim,9876,2014-08-14,williams
1.csv,4,Jim,9876,not_a_date,jones
1.csv,5,Jim,9876,2014-08-14,dean
1.csv,6,Jim,9876,2014-08-14,Ruzyck
Desired output:
Row#5,4.csv,4,Jim,9876,not_a_date,jones (this is an erroneous row)
The condition I have chosen is print to output if anything in the date field is not a date.
As you can see, my desired output contains the line number where the error occurred, along with the data itself.
After I have my output that shows the lines within each file that are in error, I want to grab that line from the untouched original CSV file to redo (both modified and original files contain the same amount of rows). After I have a file of these redone rows, I can omit and clean up where needed to prevent interruption of an import.
Folder structure will contain:
Modified: 4.txt
Original: 4.csv
I have something started here, written in Perl, which by the logic will at least return the rows I need. However I believe my syntax is a little off and I do not know how to plug in the other subroutines.
Code:
$count = 1;
while (<>) {
unless ($F[4] =~ /\d+[-]\d+[-]\d+/)
print "Row#" . $count++ . "," . "$_";
}
The code above is supposed to give me my erroneous rows, but to be able to extract them from the originals is beyond me. The above code also contains some syntax errors.

Answer 1

This will do as you ask.
Please be certain that none of the fields in the data can ever contain a comma , otherwise you will need to use Text::CSV to process it instead of just a simple split.
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.010;
use autodie;
open my $fh, '<', 'example.csv';
<$fh>; # Skip header
while (<$fh>) {
my #fields = split /,/;
if( $fields[4] !~ /^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$/ ) {
print "Row#$.,$_";
}
}
output
Row#5,4.csv,4,Jim,9876,not_a_date,jones
Update
If you want to process a number of files then you need this instead.
The close ARGV at the end of the loop is there so that the line counter $. is reset to
1 at the start of each file. Without it it just continues from 1 upwards across all the files.
You would run this like
rob#Samurai-U:~$ perl findbad.pl *.csv
or you could list the files individually, separated by spaces.
For the test I have created files 1.csv and 2.csv which are identical to your example data except that the first field of each line is the name of the file containing the data.
You may not want the line in the output that announces each file name, in which case you should replace the entire first if block with just next if $. == 1.
use strict;
use warnings;
#ARGV = map { glob qq{"$_"} } #ARGV; # For Windows
while (<>) {
if ($. == 1) {
print "\n\nFile: $ARGV\n\n";
next;
}
my #fields = split /,/;
unless ( $fields[4] =~ /^\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}$/ ) {
printf "Row#%d,%s", $., $_;
}
close ARGV if eof ARGV;
}
output
File: 1.csv
Row#5,1.csv,4,Jim,9876,not_a_date,jones
File: 2.csv
Row#5,2.csv,4,Jim,9876,not_a_date,jones