find a match and replace next line in perl - perl

I am working on the perl script and need some help with it. The requirement is, I have to find a lable and once the label is found, I have to replace the word in a line immediately following the label. for Example, if the label is ABC:
ABC:
string to be replaced
some other lines
ABC:
string to be replaced
some other lines
ABC:
string to be replaced
I want to write a script to match the label (ABC) and once the label is found, replace a word in the next line immediately following the label.
Here is my attempt:
open(my $fh, "<", "file1.txt") or die "cannot open file:$!";
while (my $line = <$fh>))
{
next if ($line =~ /ABC/) {
$line =~ s/original_string/replaced_string/;
}
else {
$msg = "pattern not found \n ";
print "$msg";
}
}
Is this correct..? Any help will be greatly appreciated.

The following one-liner will do what you need:
perl -pe '++$x and next if /ABC:/; $x-- and s/old/new/ if $x' inFile > outFile
The code sets a flag and gets the next line if the label is found. If the flag is set, it's unset and the substitution is executed.
Hope this helps!

You're doing this in your loop:
next if ($line =~ /ABC/);
So, you're reading the file, if a line contains ABC anywhere in that line, you skip the line. However, for every other line, you do the replacement. In the end, you're replacing the string on all other lines and printing that out, and your not printing out your labels.
Here's what you said:
I have to read the file until I find a line with the label:
Once the label is found
I have to read the next line and replace the word in a line immediately following the label.
So:
You want to read through a file line-by-line.
If a line matches the label
read the next line
replace the text on the line
Print out the line
Following these directions:
use strict;
use warnings; # Hope you're using strict and warnings
use autodie; # Program automatically dies on failed opens. No need to check
use feature qw(say); # Allows you to use say instead of print
open my $fh, "<", "file1.txt"; # Removed parentheses. It's the latest style
while (my $line = <$fh>) {
chomp $line; # Always do a chomp after a read.
if ( $line eq "ABC:" ) { # Use 'eq' to ensure an exact match for your label
say "$line"; # Print out the current line
$line = <$fh> # Read the next line
$line =~ s/old/new/; # Replace that word
}
say "$line"; # Print the line
}
close $fh; # Might as well do it right
Note that when I use say, I don't have to put the \n on the end of the line. Also, by doing my chomp after my read, I can easily match the label without worrying about the \n on the end.
This is done exactly as you said it should be done, but there are a couple of issues. The first is that when we do $line = <$fh>, there's no guarantee we are really reading a line. What if the file ends right there?
Also, it's bad practice to read a file in multiple places. It makes it harder to maintain the program. To get around this issue, we'll use a flag variable. This allows us to know if the line before was a tag or not:
use strict;
use warnings; # Hope you're using strict and warnings
use autodie; # Program automatically dies on failed opens. No need to check
use feature qw(say); # Allows you to use say instead of print
open my $fh, "<", "file1.txt"; # Removed parentheses. It's the latest style
my $tag_found = 0; # Flag isn't set
while (my $line = <$fh>) {
chomp $line; # Always do a chomp after a read.
if ( $line eq "ABC:" ) { # Use 'eq' to ensure an exact match for your label
$tag_found = 1 # We found the tag!
}
if ( $tag_found ) {
$line =~ s/old/new/; # Replace that word
$tag_found = 0; # Reset our flag variable
}
say "$line"; # Print the line
}
close $fh; # Might as well do it right
Of course, I would prefer to eliminate mysterious values. For example, the tag should be a variable or constant. Same with the string you're searching for and the string you're replacing.
You mentioned this was a word, so your regular expression replacement should probably look like this:
$line =~ s/\b$old_word\b/$new_word/;
The \b mark word boundaries. This way, if you're suppose to replace the word cat with dog, you don't get tripped up on a line that says:
The Jeopardy category is "Say what".
You don't want to change category to dogegory.

Your problem is that reading in a file does not work like that. You're doing it line by line, so when your regex tests true, the line you want to change isn't there yet. You can try adding a boolean variable to check if the last line was a label.
#!/usr/bin/perl;
use strict;
use warnings;
my $found;
my $replacement = "Hello";
while(my $line = <>){
if($line =~ /ABC/){
$found = 1;
next;
}
if($found){
$line =~ s/^.*?$/$replacement/;
$found = 0;
print $line, "\n";
}
}

Or you could use File::Slurp and read the whole file into one string:
use File::Slurp;
$x = read_file( "file.txt" );
$x =~ s/^(ABC:\s*$ [\n\r]{1,2}^.*?)to\sbe/$1to was/mgx;
print $x;
using /m to make the ^ and $ match embedded begin/end of lines
x is to allow the space after the $ - there is probably a better way
Yields:
ABC:
string to was replaced
some other lines
ABC:
string to was replaced
some other lines
ABC:
string to was replaced

Also, relying on perl's in-place editing:
use File::Slurp qw(read_file write_file);
use strict;
use warnings;
my $file = 'fakefile1.txt';
# Initialize Fake data
write_file($file, <DATA>);
# Enclosed is the actual code that you're looking for.
# Everything else is just for testing:
{
local #ARGV = $file;
local $^I = '.bac';
while (<>) {
print;
if (/ABC/ && !eof) {
$_ = <>;
s/.*/replaced string/;
print;
}
}
unlink "$file$^I";
}
# Compare new file.
print read_file($file);
1;
__DATA__
ABC:
string to be replaced
some other lines
ABC:
string to be replaced
some other lines
ABC:
string to be replaced
ABC:
outputs
ABC:
replaced string
some other lines
ABC:
replaced string
some other lines
ABC:
replaced string
ABC:

Related

Search and replace a string in a file

I'm trying to read contents from an input file, copy only certain lines of code from the file and print in an output file.
Certain lines of code is determined by:
Code name to determine the first line (IP1_NAME or IP2_NAME)
Pattern to determine the last line (END_OF_LIST)
Input file:
IP1_NAME
/ip1name/ip1dir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip1name/ip1dir
/ip1testname/ip1testdir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip1testname/ip1testdir
END_OF_LIST
IP2_NAME
/ip2name/ip2dir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip2name/ip2dir
/ip2testname/ip2testdir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip2testname/ip2testdir
END_OF_LIST
Output file:
(If IP1_NAME is chosen and the CLIENT_NAME should be replaced by tester_ip)
/ip1name/ip1dir/ //tester_ip/ip1name/ip1dir
/ip1testname/ip1testdir/ //tester_ip/ip1testname/ip1testdir
You could use the following one-liner to pull out the lines between the two patterns:
perl -0777 -ne 'print "$1\n" while /IP1_NAME(.*?)END_OF_LIST/gs' in.txt > out.txt
Where in.txt is your input file and out.txt is the output file.
This use case is actually described in perlfaq6: Regular Expressions.
You can then modify the output file to replace CLIENT_NAME with tester_ip:
perl -pi -e 's/CLIENT_NAME/tester_ip/' y.txt
As a script instead of a one-liner, using the scalar range operator:
#/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use autodie;
use feature qw/say/;
process('input.txt', qr/^IP1_NAME$/, qr/^END_OF_LIST$/, 'tester_ip');
sub process {
my ($filename, $startpat, $endpat, $newip) = #_;
open my $file, '<', $filename;
while (my $line = <$file>) {
chomp $line;
if ($line =~ /$startpat/ .. $line =~ /$endpat/) {
next unless $line =~ /^\s/; # Skip the start and lines.
$line =~ s/^\s+//; # Remove indentation
$line =~ s/CLIENT_NAME/$newip/g; # Replace with desired value
say $line;
}
}
}
Running this on your sample input file produces:
/ip1name/ip1dir/ //tester_ip/ip1name/ip1dir
/ip1testname/ip1testdir/ //tester_ip/ip1testname/ip1testdir
I am assuming there is additional stuff in your input file, otherwise we would not have to jump through the hoops with these start and end markers as and we could just say
perl -ne "print if /^ /"
and that would be silly, right ;-)
So, the flipflop has potential problems as I stated in my comment. And while clever, it does not buy you that much in terms of readability or verbosement (verbocity?), since you have to test again anyway in order to not process the marker lines.
As long as there is no exclusive flip flop operator, I would go for a more robust solution.
my $in;
while (<DATA>) {
$in = 1, next if /^IP\d_NAME/;
$in = 0 if /^END_OF_LIST/;
if ( $in )
{
s/CLIENT_NAME/tester_ip/;
print;
}
}
__DATA__
cruft
IP1_NAME
/ip1name/ip1dir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip1name/ip1dir
/ip1testname/ip1testdir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip1testname/ip1testdir
END_OF_LIST
more
cruft
IP2_NAME
/ip2name/ip2dir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip2name/ip2dir
/ip2testname/ip2testdir/ //CLIENT_NAME/ip2testname/ip2testdir
END_OF_LIST
Lore Ipsargh!

Copying content from one file to another file using perl

Following code is for copying file content from readfile to writefile. Instead of copying upto last, i want to copy upto some keyword.
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Slurp;
my #lines = read_file('readfile.txt');
while ( my $line = shift #lines) {
next unless ($line =~ m/END OF HEADER/);
last; # here suggest some other logic
}
append_file('writefile.txt', #lines);
next will continue to the next iteration of the loop, effectively skipping the rest of the statements in the loop for that iteration (in this case, the last).
last will immediately exit the loop, which sounds like what you want. So you should be able to simply put the conditional statement on the last.
Also, I'm not sure why you want to read the entire file into memory to iterate over its lines? Why not just use a regular while(<>)? And I would recommend avoiding File::Slurp, it has some long-standing issues.
You don't show any example input with expected output, and your description is unclear - you said "i want to copy upto some keyword" but in your code you use shift, which removes items from the beginning of the array.
Do you want to remove the lines before or after and including or not including "END OF HEADER"?
This code will copy over only the header:
use warnings;
use strict;
my $infile = 'readfile.txt';
my $outfile = 'writefile.txt';
open my $ifh, '<', $infile or die "$infile: $!";
open my $ofh, '>', $outfile or die "$outfile: $!";
while (<$ifh>) {
last if /END OF HEADER/;
print $ofh $_;
}
close $ifh;
close $ofh;
Whereas if you want to copy everything after the header, you could replace the while above with:
while (<$ifh>) {
last if /END OF HEADER/;
}
while (<$ifh>) {
print $ofh $_;
}
Which will loop and do nothing until it sees END OF HEADER, then breaking out of the first loop and moving to the second, which prints out the lines after the header.
data.txt:
fsffs
sfsfsf
sfSDFF
END OF HEADER
{ dsgs xdgfxdg zFZ }
dgdbg
vfraeer
Code:
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.020;
use autodie;
use Data::Dumper;
my $infile = 'data.txt';
my $header_file = 'header.txt';
my $after_header_file = 'after_header.txt';
open my $DATA, '<', $infile;
open my $HEADER, '>', $header_file;
open my $AFTER_HEADER, '>', $after_header_file;
{
local $/ = "END OF HEADER";
my $header = <$DATA>;
say {$HEADER} $header;
my $rest = <$DATA>;
say {$AFTER_HEADER} $rest;
}
close $DATA;
close $HEADER;
close $AFTER_HEADER;
say "Created files: $header_file, $after_header_file";
Output:
$ perl 1.pl
Created files: header.txt, after_header.txt
$ cat header.txt
fsffs
sfsfsf
sfSDFF
END OF HEADER
$ cat after_header.txt
{ dsgs xdgfxdg zFZ }
dgdbg
vfraeer
$/ specifies the input record separator, which by default is a newline. Therefore, when you read from a file:
while (my $x = <$INFILE>) {
}
each value of $x is a sequence of characters up to and including the input recored separator, i.e. a newline, which is what we normally think of as a line of text in a file. Often, we chomp off the newline/input_record_separator at the end of the text:
while (my $x = <$INFILE>) {
chomp $x;
say "$x is a dog";
}
But, you can set the input record separator to anything you want, like your "END OF HEADER" text. That means a line will be all the text up to and including the input record separator, which in this case is "END OF HEADER". For example, a line will be: "abc\ndef\nghi\nEND OF HEADER". Furthermore, chomp() will now remove "END OF HEADER" from the end of its argument, so you could chomp your line if you don't want the "END OF HEADER" marker in the output file.
If perl cannot find the input record separator, then perl keeps reading the file until perl hits the end of the file, then perl returns all the text that was read.
You can use those operations to your advantage when you want to seek to some specific text in a file.
Declaring a variable as local makes the variable magical: when the closing brace of the surrounding block is encountered, perl sets the variable back to the value it had just before the opening brace of the surrounding block:
#Here, by default $/ = "\n", but some code out here could have
#also set $/ to something else
{
local $/ = "END OF HEADER";
} # $/ gets set back to whatever value it had before this block
When you change one of perl's predefined global variables, it's considered good practice to only change the variable for as long as you need to use the variable, then change the variable back to what it was.
If you want to target just the text between the braces, you can do:
data.txt:
fsffs
sfsfsf
sfSDFF
END OF HEADER { dsgs xdgfxdg zFZ }
dgdbg
vfraeer
Code snippet:
...
...
{
local $/ = 'END OF HEADER {';
my $pre_brace = <$DATA>;
$/ = '}';
my $target_text = <$DATA>;
chomp $target_text; #Removes closing brace
say "->$target_text<-";
}
--output:--
-> dsgs xdgfxdg zFZ <-

doing a substitution until certain condition is true

I'm trying to edit a text using Perl. I need to make a substitution but the substitution cannot be applied once an specific word is found in the text. So, imagine I want to substitute all the "hello" forms by "goodbye", but the substitution cannot be applied once the word "foo" is found.
I tried to do this:
use warnings;
use strict;
$/ = undef;
my $filename = shift;
open F, $filename or die "Usa: $0 FILENAME\n";
while(<F>) {
do {s/hello/goodbay/} until (m{foo});
print;
}
close F;
But, as a result, only the first "hello" of my text is changed.
Any suggestion?
Trying to think what would be the most efficient. It should be one of the following:
s{^(.*?)(foo|\z)}{
my $s = $1;
$s =~ s{hello}{goodbay}g;
$s.$2
}se;
print;
or (same as above, but requires 5.14+)
s{^(.*?)(foo|\z)}{ s{hello}{goodbay}gr . $2 }se;
print;
or
my $pos = /foo/ ? $-[0] : length;
my $s = substr($_, 0, $pos, '');
$s =~ s{hello}{goodbay}g;
print($s);
print;
Both work even if foo isn't present.
This solution uses less memory:
# Assumes foo will always be present
# (though it could be expanded to handle that
# Assumes foo isn't a regex pattern.
local $/ = "foo";
$_ = <$fh>;
chomp;
s{hello}{goodbay}g;
print;
print $/;
local $/;
print <$fh>;
If the substrings you work on (the hello and foo of your example) are single words, a easy way would probably be to replace $/ = undef; with $/ = " ";. Currently you slurp in the whole file at once, meaning the while loop gets executed at most once.
That is because there is only one "line" in the whole input after you told perl that there are no line separators.
If you use a space as input separator, it will loop over the input word by word and hopefully work as you intend.
Use a flag variable:
use warnings;
use strict;
my $filename = shift;
open F, $filename or die "Usa: $0 FILENAME\n";
my $replace=1;
while(<F>) {
$replace = 0 if m{foo};
s/hello/goodbye/g if $replace;
print;
}
close F;
This stops at the line containing the end pattern. It will be slightly more complicated if you want to substitute up to just before the match.
This answer uses the ${^PREMATCH] and related variables introduced in Perl 5.10.
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use v5.10.0;
use strict;
use warnings;
my $foo_found;
while (my $line = <>) {
if (!$foo_found) {
if ($line =~ m/foo/ip) {
# only replace hellos in the part before foo
${^PREMATCH} =~ s/hello/goodbye/g;
$line = "${^PREMATCH}${^MATCH}${^POSTMATCH}";
$foo_found ++;
} else {
$line =~ s/hello/goodbye/ig;
}
}
print $line;
}
Given the following input:
hello cruel world
hello baseball
hello mudda, hello fadda
foo
The rest of the hellos should stay
Last hello
I get the following output
goodbye cruel world
goodbye baseball
goodbye mudda, goodbye fadda
foo
The rest of the hellos should stay
Last hello
If you don't have 5.10 you can use $` and related variables but they come with a performance hit. See perldoc perlvar for details.

Print only the first word in line

I need some help with following perl code.
#!perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;
open my $file, '<', 'ubb' or die $1;
my $spool = 0;
my #matchingLines;
while (<$file>) {
if (/GROUPS/i) {
$spool = 1;
next;
}
elsif (/SERVERS/i) {
$spool = 0;
print map { "$_" } #matchingLines;
#matchingLines = ();
}
if ($spool) {
push (#matchingLines, $_);
}
}
close ($file);
Output from that is shown below.
ADM LMID=GW_S4_1_PM,GW_S4_2_BM
GRPNO=1
ADM_TMS LMID=GW_S4_1_PM,GW_S4_2_BM
GRPNO=2
TMSNAME=TMS
ADM_1 LMID=GW_S4_1_PM
GRPNO=11
ADM_2 LMID=GW_S4_2_BM
GRPNO=12
DMWSG_Gateway_1 LMID=GW_S4_1_PM
GRPNO=101
ENVFILE="../GW_S4.Gateway.envfile"
DMWSG_Gateway_2 LMID=GW_S4_2_BM
GRPNO=201
ENVFILE="../GW_S4.Gateway.envfile"
DMWSG_1 LMID=GW_S4_1_PM
GRPNO=106
DMWSG_2 LMID=GW_S4_2_BM
GRPNO=206
But I only would like to get the first word of each line (e.g. ADM, ADM_TMS, ADM_1).
Note that the file has a lot of other lines above and below what's printed here. I only want to do this for lines that is in between GROUPS and SERVERS.
I would suggest 2 changes in your code
Note: Tested these with your sample data (plus other stuff) in your question.
I: Extract first word before push
Change this
push (#matchingLines, $_);
to
push (#matchingLines, /^(\S+)/);
This would push the first word of each line into the array, instead of the entire line.
Note that /^(\S+)/ is shorthand for $_ =~ /^(\S+)/. If you're using an explicit loop variable like in 7stud's answer, you can't use this shorthand, use the explicit syntax instead, say $line =~ /^(\S+)/ or whatever your loop variable is.
Of course, you can also use split function as suggested in 7stud's answer.
II: Change how you print
Change this
print map { "$_" } #matchingLines;
into
local $" = "\n";
print "#matchingLines \n";
$" specifies the delimiter used for list elements when the array is printed with print or say inside double quotes.
Alternatively, as per TLP's suggestion,
$\ = $/;
print for #lines;
or
print join("\n", #lines), "\n"
Note that $/ is the input record separator (newline by default), $\ is the output record separator (undefined by default). $\ is appended after each print command.
For more information on $/, $\, and $":
See perldoc perlvar (just use CTRL+F to find them in that page)
Or you can simply use perldoc -v '$/' etc on your console to get those information.
Note on readability
I don't think implicit regex matching i.e. /pattern/ is bad per se.
But matching against a variable, i.e. $variable =~ /pattern/ is more readable (as in you can immediately see there's a regex matching going on) and more beginner-friendly, at the cost of conciseness.
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.014; #say()
my $fname = 'data.txt';
open my $INFILE, '<', $fname
or die "Couldn't open $fname: $!"; #-->Not $1"
my $recording_on = 0;
my #matching_lines;
for my $line (<$INFILE>) {
if ($line =~ /groups/i) {
$recording_on = 1;
next;
}
elsif ($line =~ /servers/i) {
say for #matching_lines; #say() is the same as print(), but it adds a newline at the end
#matching_lines = ();
$recording_on = 0;
}
if ($recording_on) {
my ($first_word, $trash) = split " ", $line, 2;
push #matching_lines, $first_word;
}
}
close $INFILE;
You can use the flip-flop operator (range) to select a part of your input. The idea of this operator is that it returns false until its LHS (left hand side) returns true, and after that it returns true until its RHS returns false, after which it is reset. It is somewhat like preserving a state.
Note that the edge lines are also included in the match, so we need to remove those. After that, use doubleDown's idea and push /^(\S+)/ onto an array. The nice thing about using this with push is that the capture regex returns an empty list if it fails, and this gives us a warning-free failure when the regex does not match.
use strict;
use warnings;
my #matches;
while (<>) {
if (/GROUPS/i .. /SERVERS/i) { # flip-flop remembers the matches
next if (/GROUPS/i or /SERVERS/i);
push #matches, /^(\S+)/;
}
}
# #matches should now contain the first words of those lines

With Perl, how do I read records from a file with two possible record separators?

Here is what I am trying to do:
I want to read a text file into an array of strings. I want the string to terminate when the file reads in a certain character (mainly ; or |).
For example, the following text
Would you; please
hand me| my coat?
would be put away like this:
$string[0] = 'Would you;';
$string[1] = ' please hand me|';
$string[2] = ' my coat?';
Could I get some help on something like this?
This will do it. The trick to using split while preserving the token you're splitting on is to use a zero-width lookback match: split(/(?<=[;|])/, ...).
Note: mctylr's answer (currently the top rated) isn't actually correct -- it will split fields on newlines, b/c it only works on a single line of the file at a time.
gbacon's answer using the input record separator ($/) is quite clever--it's both space and time efficient--but I don't think I'd want to see it in production code. Putting one split token in the record separator and the other in the split strikes me as a little too unobvious (you have to fight that with Perl ...) which will make it hard to maintain. I'm also not sure why he's deleting multiple newlines (which I don't think you asked for?) and why he's doing that only for the end of '|'-terminated records.
# open file for reading, die with error message if it fails
open(my $fh, '<', 'data.txt') || die $!;
# set file reading to slurp (whole file) mode (note that this affects all
# file reads in this block)
local $/ = undef;
my $string = <$fh>;
# convert all newlines into spaces, not specified but as per example output
$string =~ s/\n/ /g;
# split string on ; or |, using a zero-width lookback match (?<=) to preserve char
my (#strings) = split(/(?<=[;|])/, $string);
One way is to inject another character, like \n, whenever your special character is found, then split on the \n:
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
while (<DATA>) {
chomp;
s/([;|])/$1\n/g;
my #string = split /\n/;
print Dumper(\#string);
}
__DATA__
Would you; please hand me| my coat?
Prints out:
$VAR1 = [
'Would you;',
' please hand me|',
' my coat?'
];
UPDATE: The original question posed by James showed the input text on a single line, as shown in __DATA__ above. Because the question was poorly formatted, others edited the question, breaking the 1 line into 2. Only James knows whether 1 or 2 lines was intended.
I prefer #toolic's answer because it deals with multiple separators very easily.
However, if you wanted to overly complicate things, you could always try:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;
my #contents = ('');
while ( my $line = <DATA> ) {
last unless $line =~ /\S/;
$line =~ s{$/}{ };
if ( $line =~ /^([^|;]+[|;])(.+)$/ ) {
$contents[-1] .= $1;
push #contents, $2;
}
else {
$contents[-1] .= $1;
}
}
print "[$_]\n" for #contents;
__DATA__
Would you; please
hand me| my coat?
Something along the lines of
$text = <INPUTFILE>;
#string = split(/[;!]/, $text);
should do the trick more or less.
Edit: I've changed "/;!/" to "/[;!]/".
Let Perl do half the work for you by setting $/ (the input record separator) to vertical bar, and then extract semicolon-separated fields:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my #string;
*ARGV = *DATA;
$/ = "|";
while (<>) {
s/\n+$//;
s/\n/ /g;
push #string => $1 while s/^(.*;)//;
push #string => $_;
}
for (my $i = 0; $i < #string; ++$i) {
print "\$string[$i] = '$string[$i]';\n";
}
__DATA__
Would you; please
hand me| my coat?
Output:
$string[0] = 'Would you;';
$string[1] = ' please hand me|';
$string[2] = ' my coat?';