I have a directory full of files containing records like:
FAKE ORGANIZATION
799 S FAKE AVE
Northern Blempglorff, RI 99xxx
01/26/2011
These items are being held for you at the location shown below each one.
IF YOU ASKED THAT MATERIAL BE MAILED TO YOU, PLEASE DISREGARD THIS NOTICE.
The Waltons. The complete DAXXXX12118198
Pickup at:CHUPACABRA LOCATION 02/02/2011
GRIMLY, WILFORD
29 FAKE LANE
S. BLEMPGLORFF RI 99XXX
I need to remove all entries with the expression Pickup at:CHUPACABRA LOCATION.
The "record separator" issue:
I can't touch the input file's formatting -- it must be retained as is. Each record
is separated by roughly 40+ new lines.
Here's some awk ( this works ):
BEGIN {
RS="\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n+"
FS="\n"
}
!/CHUPACABRA/{print $0}
My stab with perl:
perl -a -F\n -ne '$/ = "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n+";$\ = "\n";chomp;$regex="CHUPACABRA";print $_ if $_ !~ m/$regex/i;' data/lib51.000
Nothing is returned. I'm not sure how to specify 'field separator' in perl except at the commandline. Tried the a2p utility -- no dice. For the curious, here's what it produces:
eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^([A-Za-z
# process any FOO=bar switches
#$FS = ' '; # set field separator
$, = ' '; # set output field separator
$\ = "\n"; # set output record separator
$/ = "\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n+";
$FS = "\n";
while (<>) {
chomp; # strip record separator
if (!/CHUPACABRA/) {
print $_;
}
}
This has to run under someone's Windows box otherwise I'd stick with awk.
Thanks!
Bubnoff
EDIT ( SOLVED ) **
Thanks mob!
Here's a ( working ) perl script version ( adjusted a2p output ):
eval '$'.$1.'$2;' while $ARGV[0] =~ /^([A-Za-z
# process any FOO=bar switches
#$FS = ' '; # set field separator
$, = ' '; # set output field separator
$\ = "\n"; # set output record separator
$/ = "\n"x10;
$FS = "\n";
while (<>) {
chomp; # strip record separator
if (!/CHUPACABRA/) {
print $_;
}
}
Feel free to post improvements or CPAN goodies that make this more idiomatic and/or perl-ish. Thanks!
In Perl, the record separator is a literal string, not a regular expression. As the perlvar doc famously says:
Remember: the value of $/ is a string, not a regex. awk has to be better for something. :-)
Still, it looks like you can get away with $/="\n" x 10 or something like that:
perl -a -F\n -ne '$/="\n"x10;$\="\n";chomp;$regex="CHUPACABRA";
print if /\S/ && !m/$regex/i;' data/lib51.000
Note the extra /\S/ &&, which will skip empty paragraphs from input that has more than 20 consecutive newlines.
Also, have you considered just installing Cygwin and having awk available on your Windows machine?
There is no need for (much)conversion if you can download gawk for windows
Did you know that Perl comes with a program called a2p that does exactly what you described you want to do in your title?
And, if you have Perl on your machine, the documentation for this program is already there:
C> perldoc a2p
My own suggestion is to get the Llama book and learn Perl anyway. Despite what the Python people say, Perl is a great and flexible language. If you know shell, awk and grep, you'll understand many of the Perl constructs without any problems.
Related
I have a large string file seq.txt of letters, unwrapped, with over 200,000 characters. No spaces, numbers etc, just a-z.
I have a second file search.txt which has lines of 50 unique letters which will match once in seq.txt. There are 4000 patterns to match.
I want to be able to find each of the patterns (lines in file search.txt), and then get the 100 characters before and 100 characters after the pattern match.
I have a script which uses grep and works, but this runs very slowly, only does the first 100 characters, and is written out with echo. I am not knowledgeable enough in awk or perl to interpret scripts online that may be applicable, so I am hoping someone here is!
cat search.txt | while read p; do echo "grep -zoP '.{0,100}$p' seq.txt | sed G"; done > do.grep
Easier example with desired output:
>head seq.txt
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
>head search.txt
fgh
pqr
uvw
>head desiredoutput.txt
cdefghijk
mnopqrstu
rstuvwxyz
Best outcome would be a tab separated file of the 100 characters before \t matched pattern \t 100 characters after. Thank you in advance!
One way
use warnings;
use strict;
use feature 'say';
my $string;
# Read submitted files line by line (or STDIN if #ARGV is empty)
while (<>) {
chomp;
$string = $_;
last; # just in case, as we need ONE line
}
# $string = q(abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz); # test
my $padding = 3; # for the given test sample
my #patterns = do {
my $search_file = 'search.txt';
open my $fh, '<', $search_file or die "Can't open $search_file: $!";
<$fh>;
};
chomp #patterns;
# my #patterns = qw(bcd fgh pqr uvw); # test
foreach my $patt (#patterns) {
if ( $string =~ m/(.{0,$padding}) ($patt) (.{0,$padding})/x ) {
say "$1\t$2\t$3";
# or
# printf "%-3s\t%3s%3s\n", $1, $2, $3;
}
}
Run as program.pl seq.txt, or pipe the content of seq.txt to it.†
The pattern .{0,$padding} matches any character (.), up to $padding times (3 above), what I used in case the pattern $patt is found at a position closer to the beginning of the string than $padding (like the first one, bcd, that I added to the example provided in the question). The same goes for the padding after the $patt.
In your problem then replace $padding to 100. With the 100 wide "padding" before and after each pattern, when a pattern is found at a position closer to the beginning than the 100 then the desired \t alignment could break, if the position is lesser than 100 by more than the tab value (typically 8).
That's what the line with the formatted print (printf) is for, to ensure the width of each field regardless of the length of the string being printed. (It is commented out since we are told that no pattern ever gets into the first or last 100 chars.)
If there is indeed never a chance that a matched pattern breaches the first or the last 100 positions then the regex can be simplified to
/(.{$padding}) ($patt) (.{$padding})/x
Note that if a $patt is within the first/last $padding chars then this just won't match.
The program starts the regex engine for each of #patterns, what in principle may raise performance issues (not for one run with the tiny number of 4000 patterns, but such requirements tend to change and generally grow). But this is by far the simplest way to go since
we have no clue how the patterns may be distributed in the string, and
one match may be inside the 100-char buffer of another (we aren't told otherwise)
If there is a performance problem with this approach please update.
† The input (and output) of the program can be organized in a better way using named command-line arguments via Getopt::Long, for an invocation like
program.pl --sequence seq.txt --search search.txt --padding 100
where each argument may be optional here, with defaults set in the file, and argument names may be shortened and/or given additional names, etc. Let me know if that is of interest
One in awk. -v b=3 is the before context length -v a=3 is the after context length and -v n=3 is the match length which is always constant. It hashes all the substrings of seq.txt to memory so it uses it depending on the size of the seq.txt and you might want to follow the consumption with top, like: abcdefghij -> s["def"]="abcdefghi" , s["efg"]="bcdefghij" etc.
$ awk -v b=3 -v a=3 -v n=3 '
NR==FNR {
e=length()-(n+a-1)
for(i=1;i<=e;i++) {
k=substr($0,(i+b),n)
s[k]=s[k] (s[k]==""?"":ORS) substr($0,i,(b+n+a))
}
next
}
($0 in s) {
print s[$0]
}' seq.txt search.txt
Output:
cdefghijk
mnopqrstu
rstuvwxyz
You can tell grep to search for all the patterns in one go.
sed 's/.*/.{0,100}&.{0,100}/' search.txt |
grep -zoEf - seq.txt |
sed G >do.grep
4000 patterns should be easy peasy, though if you get to hundreds of thousands, maybe you will want to optimize.
There is no Perl regex here, so I switched from the nonstandard grep -P to the POSIX-compatible and probably more efficient grep -E.
The surrounding context will consume any text it prints, so any match within 100 characters from the previous one will not be printed.
You can try following approach to your problem:
load string input data
load into an array patterns
loop through each pattern and look for it in the string
form an array from found matches
loop through matches array and print result
NOTE: the code is not tested due absence of input data
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
my $fname_s = 'seq.txt';
my $fname_p = 'search.txt';
open my $fh, '<', $fname_s
or die "Couldn't open $fname_s";
my $data = do { local $/; <$fh> };
close $fh;
open my $fh, '<', $fname_p
or die "Couln't open $fname_p";
my #patterns = <$fh>;
close $fh;
chomp #patterns;
for ( #patterns ) {
my #found = $data =~ s/(.{100}$_.{100})/g;
s/(.{100})(.{50})(.{100})/$1 $2 $3/ && say for #found;
}
Test code for provided test data (added latter)
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature 'say';
my #pat = qw/fgh pqr uvw/;
my $data = do { local $/; <DATA> };
for( #pat ) {
say $1 if $data =~ /(.{3}$_.{3})/;
}
__DATA__
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
Output
cdefghijk
mnopqrstu
rstuvwxyz
Two Perl scripts, using different input record separators, work together to convert a LaTeX file into something easily searched for human-readable phrases and sentences. Of course, they could be wrapped together by a single shell script. But I am curious whether they can be incorporated into a single Perl script.
The reason for these scripts: It would be a hassle to find "two three" inside short.tex, for instance. But after conversion, grep 'two three' will return the first paragraph.
For any LaTeX file (here, short.tex), the scripts are invoked as follows.
cat short.tex | try1.pl | try2.pl
try1.pl works on paragraphs. It gets rid of LaTeX comments. It makes sure that each word is separated from its neighbors by a single space, so that no sneaky tabs, form feeds, etc., lurk between words. The resulting paragraph occupies a single line, consisting of visible characters separated by single spaces --- and at the end, a sequence of at least two newlines.
try2.pl slurps the entire file. It makes sure that paragraphs are separated from each other by exactly two newlines. And it ensures that the last line of the file is non-trivial, containing visible character(s).
Can one elegantly concatenate two operations such as these, which depend on different input record separators, into a single Perl script, say big.pl? For instance, could the work of try1.pl and try2.pl be accomplished by two functions or bracketed segments inside the larger script?
Incidentally, is there a Stack Overflow keyword for "input record separator"?
###File try1.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.18.2;
local $/ = ""; # input record separator: loop through one paragraph at a time. position marker $ comes only at end of paragraph.
while (<>) {
s/[\x25].*\n/ /g; # remove all LaTeX comments. They start with %
s/[\t\f\r ]+/ /g; # collapse each "run" of whitespace to one single space
s/^\s*\n/\n/g; # any line that looks blank is converted to a pure newline;
s/(.)\n/$1/g; # Any line that does not look blank is joined to the subsequent line
print;
print "\n\n"; # make sure each paragraph is separated from its fellows by newlines
}
###File try2.pl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.18.2;
local $/ = undef; # input record separator: entire text or file is a single record.
while (<>) {
s/[\n][\n]+/\n\n/g; # exactly 2 blank lines separate paragraphs. Like cat -s
s/[\n]+$/\n/; # last line is nontrivial; no blank line at the end
print;
}
###File short.tex:
\paragraph{One}
% comment
two % also 2
three % or 3
% comment
% comment
% comment
% comment
% comment
% comment
So they said%
that they had done it.
% comment
% comment
% comment
Fleas.
% comment
% comment
After conversion:
\paragraph{One} two three
So they said that they had done it.
Fleas.
To combine try1.pl and try2.pl into a single script you could try:
local $/ = "";
my #lines;
while (<>) {
[...] # Same code as in try1.pl except print statements
push #lines, $_;
}
$lines[-1] =~ s/\n+$/\n/;
print for #lines;
A pipe connects the output of one process to the input of another process. Neither one knows about the other nor cares how it operates.
But, putting things together like this breaks the Unix pipeline philosophy of small tools that each excel at a very narrow job. Should you link these two things, you'll always have to do both tasks even if you want one (although you could get into configuration to turn off one, but that's a lot of work).
I process a lot of LaTeX, and I control everything through a Makefile. I don't really care about what the commands look like and I don't even have to remember what they are:
short-clean.tex: short.tex
cat short.tex | try1.pl | try2.pl > $#
Let's do it anyways
I'll limit myself to the constraint of basic concatenation instead of complete rewriting or rearranging, most because there are some interesting things to show.
Consider what happens should you concatenate those two programs by simply adding the text of the second program at the end of the text of the first program.
The output from the original first program still goes to standard output and the second program now doesn't get that output as input.
The input to the program is likely exhausted by the original first program and the second program now has nothing to read. That's fine because it would have read the unprocessed input to the first program.
There are various ways to fix this, but none of them make much sense when you already have two working program that do their job. I'd shove that in the Makefile and forget about it.
But, suppose you do want it all in one file.
Rewrite the first section to send its output to a filehandle connected to a string. It's output is now in the programs memory. This basically uses the same interface, and you can even use select to make that the default filehandle.
Rewrite the second section to read from a filehandle connected to that string.
Alternately, you can do the same thing by writing to a temporary file in the first part, then reading that temporary file in the second part.
A much more sophisticated program would the first program write to a pipe (inside the program) that the second program is simultaneously reading. However, you have to pretty much rewrite everything so the two programs are happening simultaneously.
Here's Program 1, which uppercases most of the letters:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
$|++;
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print tr/a-z/A-Z/r;
}
and here's Program 2, which collapses whitespace:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
$|++;
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print s/\s+/ /gr;
}
They work serially to get the job done:
$ perl program1.pl
The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox.
THE QUICK BROWN DOG JUMPED OVER THE LAZY FOX.
^D
$ perl program2.pl
The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox.
The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox.
^D
$ perl program1.pl | perl program2.pl
The quick brown dog jumped over the lazy fox.
THE QUICK BROWN DOG JUMPED OVER THE LAZY FOX.
^D
Now I want to combine those. First, I'll make some changes that don't affect the operation but will make it easier for me later. Instead of using implicit filehandles, I'll make those explicit and one level removed from the actual filehandles:
Program 1:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
$|++;
my $output_fh = \*STDOUT;
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print { $output_fh } tr/a-z/A-Z/r;
}
Program 2:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$|++;
my $input_fh = \*STDIN;
while( <$input_fh> ) { # safer line input operator
print s/\s+/ /gr;
}
Now I have the chance to change what those filehandles are without disturbing the meat of the program. The while doesn't know or care what that filehandle is, so let's start by writing to a file in Program 1 and reading from that same file in Program 2:
Program 1:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
open my $output_fh, '>', 'program1.out' or die "$!";
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print { $output_fh } tr/a-z/A-Z/r;
}
close $output_fh;
Program 2:
#!/usr/bin/perl
$|++;
open my $input_fh, '<', 'program1.out' or die "$!";
while( <$input_fh> ) { # safer line input operator
print s/\h+/ /gr;
}
However, you can no longer run these in a pipeline because Program 1 doesn't use standard output and Program 2 doesn't read standard input:
% perl program1.pl
% perl program2.pl
You can, however, now join the programs, shebang and all:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
open my $output_fh, '>', 'program1.out' or die "$!";
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print { $output_fh } tr/a-z/A-Z/r;
}
close $output_fh;
#!/usr/bin/perl
$|++;
open my $input_fh, '<', 'program1.out' or die "$!";
while( <$input_fh> ) { # safer line input operator
print s/\h+/ /gr;
}
You can skip the file and use a string instead, but at this point, you've gone beyond merely concatenating files and need a little coordination for them to share the scalar with the data. Still, the meat of the program doesn't care how you made those filehandles:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
my $output_string;
open my $output_fh, '>', \ $output_string or die "$!";
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print { $output_fh } tr/a-z/A-Z/r;
}
close $output_fh;
#!/usr/bin/perl
$|++;
open my $input_fh, '<', \ $output_string or die "$!";
while( <$input_fh> ) { # safer line input operator
print s/\h+/ /gr;
}
So let's go one step further and do what the shell was already doing for us.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use v5.26;
pipe my $input_fh, my $output_fh;
$output_fh->autoflush(1);
while( <<>> ) { # safer line input operator
print { $output_fh } tr/a-z/A-Z/r;
}
close $output_fh;
while( <$input_fh> ) { # safer line input operator
print s/\h+/ /gr;
}
From here, it gets a bit tricky and I'm not going to go to the next step with polling filehandles so one thing can write and the the next thing reads. There are plenty of things that do that for you. And, you're now doing a lot of work to avoid something that was already simple and working.
Instead of all that pipe nonsense, the next step is to separate code into functions (likely in a library), and deal with those chunks of code as named things that hide their details:
use Local::Util qw(remove_comments minify);
while( <<>> ) {
my $result = remove_comments($_);
$result = minify( $result );
...
}
That can get even fancier where you simply go through a series of steps without knowing what they are or how many of them there will be. And, since all the baby steps are separate and independent, you're basically back to the pipeline notion:
use Local::Util qw(get_input remove_comments minify);
my $result;
my #steps = qw(get_input remove_comments minify)
while( ! eof() ) { # or whatever
no strict 'refs'
$result = &{$_}( $result ) for #steps;
}
A better way makes that an object so you can skip the soft reference:
use Local::Processor;
my #steps = qw(get_input remove_comments minify);
my $processer = Local::Processor->new( #steps );
my $result;
while( ! eof() ) { # or whatever
$result = $processor->$_($result) for #steps;
}
Like I did before, the meat of the program doesn't care or know about the steps ahead of time. That means that you can move the sequence of steps to configuration and use the same program for any combination and sequence:
use Local::Config;
use Local::Processor;
my #steps = Local::Config->new->get_steps;
my $processer = Local::Processor->new;
my $result;
while( ! eof() ) { # or whatever
$result = $processor->$_($result) for #steps;
}
I write quite a bit about this sort of stuff in Mastering Perl and Effective Perl Programming. But, because you can do it doesn't mean you should. This reinvents a lot that make can already do for you. I don't do this sort of thing without good reason—bash and make have to be pretty annoying to motivate me to go this far.
The motivating problem was to generate a "cleaned" version of a LaTeX file, which would be easy to search, using regex, for complex phrases or sentences.
The following single Perl script does the job, whereas previously I required one shell script and two Perl scripts, entailing three invocations of Perl. This new, single script incorporates three consecutive loops, each with a different input record separator.
First loop:
input = STDIN, or a file passed as argument; record separator=default, loop by line; print result to fileafterperlLIN, a temporary
file on the hard drive.
Second loop:
input = fileafterperlLIN;
record separator = "", loop by paragraph;
print result to fileafterperlPRG, a temporary file on the hard drive.
Third loop:
input = fileafterperlPRG;
record separator = undef, slurp entire file
print result to STDOUT
This has the disadvantage of printing to and reading from two files on the hard drive, which may slow it down. Advantages are that the operation seems to require only one process; and all the code resides in a single file, which should make it easier to maintain.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# 2019v04v05vFriv17h18m41s
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.18.2;
my $diagnose;
my $diagnosticstring;
my $exitcode;
my $userName = $ENV{'LOGNAME'};
my $scriptpath;
my $scriptname;
my $scriptdirectory;
my $cdld;
my $fileafterperlLIN;
my $fileafterperlPRG;
my $handlefileafterperlLIN;
my $handlefileafterperlPRG;
my $encoding;
my $count;
sub diagnosticmessage {
return unless ( $diagnose );
print STDERR "$scriptname: ";
foreach $diagnosticstring (#_) {
printf STDERR "$diagnosticstring\n";
}
}
# Routine setup
$scriptpath = $0;
$scriptname = $scriptpath;
$scriptname =~ s|.*\x2f([^\x2f]+)$|$1|;
$cdld = "$ENV{'cdld'}"; # A directory to hold temporary files used by scripts
$exitcode = system("test -d $cdld && test -w $cdld || { printf '%\n' 'cdld not a writeable directory'; exit 1; }");
die "$scriptname: system returned exitcode=$exitcode: bail\n" unless $exitcode == 0;
$scriptdirectory = "$cdld/$scriptname"; # To hold temporary files used by this script
$exitcode = system("test -d $scriptdirectory || mkdir $scriptdirectory");
die "$scriptname: system returned exitcode=$exitcode: bail\n" unless $exitcode == 0;
diagnosticmessage ( "scriptdirectory=$scriptdirectory" );
$exitcode = system("test -w $scriptdirectory && test -x $scriptdirectory || exit 1;");
die "$scriptname: system returned exitcode=$exitcode: $scriptdirectory not writeable or not executable. bail\n" unless $exitcode == 0;
$fileafterperlLIN = "$scriptdirectory/afterperlLIN.tex";
diagnosticmessage ( "fileafterperlLIN=$fileafterperlLIN" );
$exitcode = system("printf '' > $fileafterperlLIN;");
die "$scriptname: system returned exitcode=$exitcode: bail\n" unless $exitcode == 0;
$fileafterperlPRG = "$scriptdirectory/afterperlPRG.tex";
diagnosticmessage ( "fileafterperlPRG=$fileafterperlPRG" );
$exitcode=system("printf '' > $fileafterperlPRG;");
die "$scriptname: system returned exitcode=$exitcode: bail\n" unless $exitcode == 0;
# This script's job: starting with a LaTeX file, which may compile beautifully in pdflatex but be difficult
# to read visually or search automatically,
# (1) convert any line that looks blank --- a "trivial line", containing only whitespace --- to a pure newline. This is because
# (a) LaTeX interprets any whitespace line following a non-blank or "nontrivial" line as end of paragraph, whereas
# (b) Perl needs two consecutive newlines to signal end of paragraph.
# (2) remove all LaTeX comments;
# (3) deal with the \unskip LaTeX construct, etc.
# The result will be
# (4) each LaTeX paragraph will occupy a unique line
# (5) exactly one pair of newlines --- visually, one blank line --- will divide each pair of consecutive paragraphs
# (6) first paragraph will be on first line (no opening blank line) and last paragraph will be on last line (no ending blank line)
# (7) whitespace in output will consist of only
# (a) a single space between readable strings, or
# (b) double newline between paragraphs
#
$handlefileafterperlLIN = undef;
$handlefileafterperlPRG = undef;
$encoding = ":encoding(UTF-8)";
diagnosticmessage ( "fileafterperlLIN=$fileafterperlLIN" );
open($handlefileafterperlLIN, ">> $encoding", $fileafterperlLIN) || die "$0: can't open $fileafterperlLIN for appending: $!";
# Loop 1 / line:
# Default input record separator: loop through one line at a time, delimited by \n
$count = 0;
while (<>) {
$count = $count + 1;
diagnosticmessage ( "line $count" );
s/^\s*\n/\n/mg; # Convert any trivial line to a pure newline.
print $handlefileafterperlLIN $_;
}
close($handlefileafterperlLIN);
open($handlefileafterperlLIN, "< $encoding", $fileafterperlLIN) || die "$0: can't open $fileafterperlLIN for reading: $!";
open($handlefileafterperlPRG, ">> $encoding", $fileafterperlPRG) || die "$0: can't open $fileafterperlPRG for appending: $!";
# Loop PRG / paragraph:
local $/ = ""; # Input record separator: loop through one paragraph at a time. position marker $ comes only at end of paragraph.
$count = 0;
while (<$handlefileafterperlLIN>) {
$count = $count + 1;
diagnosticmessage ( "paragraph $count" );
s/(?<!\x5c)[\x25].*\n/ /g; # Remove all LaTeX comments.
# They start with % not \% and extend to end of line or newline character. Join to next line.
# s/(?<!\x5c)([\x24])/\x2a/g; # 2019v04v01vMonv13h44m09s any $ not preceded by backslash \, replace $ by * or something.
# This would be only if we are going to run detex on the output.
s/(.)\n/$1 /g; # Any line that has something other than newline, and then a newline, is joined to the subsequent line
s|([^\x2d])\s*(\x2d\x2d\x2d)([^\x2d])|$1 $2$3|g; # consistent treatment of triple hyphen as em dash
s|([^\x2d])(\x2d\x2d\x2d)\s*([^\x2d])|$1$2 $3|g; # consistent treatment of triple hyphen as em dash, continued
s/[\x0b\x09\x0c\x20]+/ /gm; # collapse each "run" of whitespace other than newline, to a single space.
s/\s*[\x5c]unskip(\x7b\x7d)?\s*(\S)/$2/g; # LaTeX whitespace-collapse across newlines
s/^\s*//; # Any nontrivial line: No indenting. No whitespace in first column.
print $handlefileafterperlPRG $_;
print $handlefileafterperlPRG "\n\n"; # make sure each paragraph ends with 2 newlines, hence at least 1 blank line.
}
close($handlefileafterperlPRG);
open($handlefileafterperlPRG, "< $encoding", $fileafterperlPRG) || die "$0: can't open $fileafterperlPRG for reading: $!";
# Loop slurp
local $/ = undef; # Input record separator: entire file is a single record.
$count = 0;
while (<$handlefileafterperlPRG>) {
$count = $count + 1;
diagnosticmessage ( "slurp $count" );
s/[\n][\n]+/\n\n/g; # Exactly 2 blank lines (newlines) separate paragraphs. Like cat -s
s/[\n]+$/\n/; # Last line is visible or "nontrivial"; no trivial (blank) line at the end
s/^[\n]+//; # No trivial (blank) line at the start. The first line is "nontrivial."
print STDOUT;
}
I have a variable $string and i want to print all the lines after I find a keyword in the line (including the line with keyword)
$string=~ /apple /;
I'm using this regexp to find the key word but I do not how to print lines after this keyword.
It's not really clear where your data is coming from. Let's assume it's a string containing newlines. Let's start by splitting it into an array.
my #string = split /\n/, $string;
We can then use the flip-flop operator to decide which lines to print. I'm using \0 as a regex that is very unlikely to match any string (so, effectively, it's always false).
for (#string) {
say if /apple / .. /\0/;
}
Just keep a flag variable, set it to true when you see the string, print if the flag is true.
perl -ne 'print if $seen ||= /apple/'
If your data in scalar variable we can use several methods
Recommended method
($matching) = $string=~ /([^\n]*apple.+)/s;
print "$matching\n";
And there is another way to do it
$string=~ /[^\n]*apple.+/s;
print $&; #it will print the data which is match.
If you reading the data from file, try the following
while (<$fh>)
{
if(/apple/)
{
print <$fh>;
}
}
Or else try the following one liner
perl -ne 'print <> and exit if(/apple/);' file.txt
Ok, so I'm very new to Perl. I have a text file and in the file there are 4 columns of data(date, time, size of files, files). I need to create a small script that can open the file and get the average size of the files. I've read so much online, but I still can't figure out how to do it. This is what I have so far, but I'm not sure if I'm even close to doing this correctly.
#!/usr/bin/perl
open FILE, "files.txt";
##array = File;
while(FILE){
#chomp;
($date, $time, $numbers, $type) = split(/ /,<FILE>);
$total += $numbers;
}
print"the total is $total\n";
This is how the data looks in the file. These are just a few of them. I need to get the numbers in the third column.
12/02/2002 12:16 AM 86016 a2p.exe
10/10/2004 11:33 AM 393 avgfsznew.pl
11/01/2003 04:42 PM 38124 c2ph.bat
Your program is reasonably close to working. With these changes it will do exactly what you want
Always use use strict and use warnings at the start of your program, and declare all of your variables using my. That will help you by finding many simple errors that you may otherwise overlook
Use lexical file handles, the three-parameter form of open, and always check the return status of any open call
Declare the $total variable outside the loop. Declaring it inside the loop means it will be created and destroyed each time around the loop and it won't be able to accumulate a total
Declare a $count variable in the same way. You will need it to calculate the average
Using while (FILE) {...} just tests that FILE is true. You need to read from it instead, so you must use the readline operator like <FILE>
You want the default call to split (without any parameters) which will return all the non-space fields in $_ as a list
You need to add a variable in the assignment to allow for athe AM or PM field in each line
Here is a modification of your code that works fine
use strict;
use warnings;
open my $fh, '<', "files.txt" or die $!;
my $total = 0;
my $count = 0;
while (<$fh>) {
my ($date, $time, $ampm, $numbers, $type) = split;
$total += $numbers;
$count += 1;
}
print "The total is $total\n";
print "The count is $count\n";
print "The average is ", $total / $count, "\n";
output
The total is 124533
The count is 3
The average is 41511
It's tempting to use Perl's awk-like auto-split option. There are 5 columns; three containing date and time information, then the size and then the name.
The first version of the script that I wrote is also the most verbose:
perl -n -a -e '$total += $F[3]; $num++; END { printf "%12.2f\n", $total / ($num + 0.0); }'
The -a (auto-split) option splits a line up on white space into the array #F. Combined with the -n option (which makes Perl run in a loop that reads the file name arguments in turn, or standard input, without printing each line), the code adds $F[3] (the fourth column, counting from 0) to $total, which is automagically initialized to zero on first use. It also counts the lines in $num. The END block is executed when all the input is read; it uses printf() to format the value. The + 0.0 ensures that the arithmetic is done in floating point, not integer arithmetic. This is very similar to the awk script:
awk '{ total += $4 } END { print total / NR }'
First drafts of programs are seldom optimal — or, at least, I'm not that good a programmer. Revisions help.
Perl was designed, in part, as an awk killer. There is still a program a2p distributed with Perl for converting awk scripts to Perl (and there's also s2p for converting sed scripts to Perl). And Perl does have an automatic (built-in) variable that keeps track of the number of lines read. It has several names. The tersest is $.; the mnemonic name $NR is available if you use English; in the script; so is $INPUT_LINE_NUMBER. So, using $num is not necessary. It also turns out that Perl does a floating point division anyway, so the + 0.0 part was unnecessary. This leads to the next versions:
perl -MEnglish -n -a -e '$total += $F[3]; END { printf "%12.2f\n", $total / $NR; }'
or:
perl -n -a -e '$total += $F[3]; END { printf "%12.2f\n", $total / $.; }'
You can tune the print format to suit your whims and fancies. This is essentially the script I'd use in the long term; it is fairly clear without being long-winded in any way. The script could be split over multiple lines if you desired. It is a simple enough task that the legibility of the one-line is not a problem, IMNSHO. And the beauty of this is that you don't have to futz around with split and arrays and read loops on your own; Perl does most of that for you. (Granted, it does blow up on empty input; that fix is trivial; see below.)
Recommended version
perl -n -a -e '$total += $F[3]; END { printf "%12.2f\n", $total / $. if $.; }'
The if $. tests whether the number of lines read is zero or not; the printf and division are omitted if $. is zero so the script outputs nothing when given no input.
There is a noble (or ignoble) game called 'Code Golf' that was much played in the early days of Stack Overflow, but Code Golf questions are no longer considered good questions. The object of Code Golf is to write a program that does a particular task in as few characters as possible. You can play Code Golf with this and compress it still further if you're not too worried about the format of the output and you're using at least Perl 5.10:
perl -Mv5.10 -n -a -e '$total += $F[3]; END { say $total / $. if $.; }'
And, clearly, there are a lot of unnecessary spaces and letters in there:
perl -Mv5.10 -nae '$t+=$F[3];END{say$t/$.if$.}'
That is not, however, as clear as the recommended version.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
open my $file, "<", "files.txt";
my ($total, $cnt);
while(<$file>){
$total += (split(/\s+/, $_))[3];
$cnt++;
}
close $file;
print "number of files: $cnt\n";
print "total size: $total\n";
printf "avg: %.2f\n", $total/$cnt;
Or you can use awk:
awk '{t+=$4} END{print t/NR}' files.txt
Try doing this :
#!/usr/bin/perl -l
use strict; use warnings;
open my $file, '<', "my_file" or die "open error [$!]";
my ($total, $count);
while (<$file>){
chomp;
next if /^$/;
my ($date, $time, $x, $numbers, $type) = split;
$total += $numbers;
$count++;
}
print "the average is " . $total/$count . " and the total is $total";
close $file;
It is as simple as this:
perl -F -lane '$a+=$F[3];END{print "The average size is ".$a/$.}' your_file
tested below:
> cat temp
12/02/2002 12:16 AM 86016 a2p.exe
10/10/2004 11:33 AM 393 avgfsznew.pl
11/01/2003 04:42 PM 38124 c2ph.bat
Now the execution:
> perl -F -lane '$a+=$F[3];END{print "The average size is ".$a/$.}' temp
The average size is 41511
>
explanation:
-F -a says store the line in an array format.with the default separator as space or tab.
so nopw $F[3] has you size of the file.
sum up all the sizes in the 4th column untill all the lines are processed.
END will be executed after processing all the lines in the file.
so $. at the end will gives the number of lines.
so $a/$. will give the average.
This solution opens the file and loops through each line of the file. It then splits the file into the five variables in the line by splitting on 1 or more spaces.
open the file for reading, "<", and if it fails, raise an error or die "..."
my ($total, $cnt) are our column total and number of files added count
while(<FILE>) { ... } loops through each line of the file using the file handle and stores the line in $_
chomp removes the input record separator in $_. In unix, the default separator is a newline \n
split(/\s+/, $_) Splits the current line represented by$_, with the delimiter \s+. \s represents a space, the + afterward means "1 or more". So, we split the next line on 1 or more spaces.
Next we update $total and $cnt
#!/usr/bin/perl
open FILE, "<", "files.txt" or die "Error opening file: $!";
my ($total, $cnt);
while(<FILE>){
chomp;
my ($date, $time, $am_pm, $numbers, $type) = split(/\s+/, $_);
$total += $numbers;
$cnt++;
}
close FILE;
print"the total is $total and count of $cnt\n";`
Suppose I have a file with these inputs:
line 1
line 2
line3
My program should only store "line1", "line2" and "line3" not the newlines. How do I achieve that?
My program already removed leading and trailing whitespaces but it doesn't help to remove newline.
I am setting $/ as \n because each input is separated by a \n.
while (<>) {
chomp;
next unless /\S/;
print "$_\n";
}
Set
$/ = q(); # that's an empty string, like "" or ''
while (<>) {
chomp;
...
}
The special value of the defined empty string is how you tell the input operator to treat one or more newlines as the terminator (preferring more), and also to get chomp to remove them all. That way each record always starts with real data.
Perl -n is the equivalent of wrapping while(<>) { } around your script. Assuming that all you need to do is eliminate blank lines, you can do it like this:
#! /usr/bin/perl -n
print unless ( /^$/ );
... On the other hand, if that's all you need to do, you might as well ditch perl and use
grep -n '^$'
Edit: your post says that you want to store values where lines are not blank... in that case, assuming that you don't have too much work to do in the rest of your script, you might do something like this:
#! /usr/bin/perl -n
my #values;
push #values, $_ unless ( /^$/ );
END {
# do whatever work you want to do here
}
... but this quickly reaches a point of limiting returns if you have very much code inside the END{} block.