Want to extract the first letter of each word - perl

Question

I basically have a variable COUNTRY along with variables SUBJID and TREAT and I want to concatenate it like this ABC002-123 /NZ/ABC.
Suppose if the COUNTRY variable had the value 'New Zealand'. I want to extract the first letter of each word, But I want extract only the first two letters of the value when there is only one word in the COUNTRY variable. I wanted a to know how to simply the below code. If possible in perl programming.
If COUNTW(COUNTRY) GT 1 THEN
CAT_VAR=
UPCASE(SUBJID||"/"||CAT(SUBSTR(SCAN(COUNTRY,1,' '),1,1),
SUBSTR(SCAN(COUNTRY,2,' '),1,1))||"/"||TREAT);

Answer 1

my #COUNTRY = ("New Zealand", "Germany");
# 'NZ', 'GE'
my #two_letters = map {
my #r = /\s/ ? /\b(\w)/g : /(..)/;
uc(join "", #r);
} #COUNTRY;

Answer 2

The SAS Perl Regular Expression solution is to use CALL PRXNEXT along with PRXPOXN or CALL PRXPOSN (or a similar function, if you prefer):
data have;
infile datalines truncover;
input #1 country $20.;
datalines;
New Zealand
Australia
Papua New Guinea
;;;;
run;
data want;
set have;
length country_letter $5.;
prx_1 = prxparse('~(?:\b([a-z])[a-z]*\b)+~io');
length=0;
start=1;
stop = length(country);
position=0;
call prxnext(prx_1,start,stop,country,position,length);
do while (position gt 0);
matchletter = prxposn(prx_1,1,country);
country_letter = cats(country_letter,matchletter);
call prxnext(prx_1,start,stop,country,position,length);
put i= position= start= stop=;
end;
run;

Answer 3

I realize the OP might not be interested in another answer, but for other users browsing this thread and not wanting to use Perl expressions I suggest the following simple solution (for the original COUNTRY variable):
FIRST_LETTERS = compress(propcase(COUNTRY),'','l');
The propcase functions capitalizes the first letters of each word and puts the other ones in lower case. The compress function with 'l' modifier deletes all lower case letters.
COUNTRY may have any number of words.

Answer 4

How about this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my #country = ('New Zealand', 'Germany', 'Tanzania', 'Mozambique', 'Irish Repuublic');
my ($one_word_letters, $two_word_letters, #initials);
foreach (#country){
if ($_ =~ /\s+/){ # Captures CAPs if 'country' contains a space
my ($first_letter, $second_letter) = ($_ =~ /([A-Z])/g);
my ($two_word_letters) = ($first_letter.$second_letter);
push #initials, $two_word_letters; # Add to array for later
}
else { ($one_word_letters) = ($_ =~ /([A-Z][a-z])/); # If 'country' is only one word long, then capture first two letters (CAP+noncap)
push #initials, $one_word_letters; # Add this to the same array
}
}
foreach (#initials){ # Print contents of the capture array:
print "$_\n";
}
Outputs:
NZ
Ge
Ta
Mo
IR
This should do the job provided there really are no 3 word countries. Easily fixed if there are though...

Answer 5

This should do.
#!/usr/bin/perl
$init = &getInitials($ARGV[0]);
if($init)
{
print $init . "\n";
exit 0;
}
else
{
print "invalid name\n";
exit 1;
}
1;
sub getInitials {
$name = shift;
$name =~ m/(^(\S)\S*?\s+(\S)\S*?$)|(^(\S\S)\S*?$)/ig;
if( defined($1) and $1 ne '' ) {
return uc($2.$3);
} elsif( defined($4) and $4 ne '' ) {
return uc($5);
} else {
return 0;
}
}