[Chicago-talk] zipcode

[Dooley, Michael]

you know the first iteration of this script I used split. but I failed to
use join. it didn't even dawn on me to use join. so many different ways to
do 1 task sometimes they get away from you.

-----Original Message-----
From: chicago-talk-bounces at mail.pm.org
[mailto:chicago-talk-bounces at mail.pm.org] On Behalf Of Jim Thomason
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 10:18 AM
To: Chicago.pm chatter
Subject: Re: [Chicago-talk] zipcode


When working with long, delimited lists of data like
that, I'm inclined to split it, twiddle it, then
reassemble it.

while (<>) {
 my @data = split /,/;
 #use substr to substitute in a space at the 4th
character if our string is 7 characters long
 substr($data[11], 4, 1, " ") if length $data[11] ==
7;
 print join(',', @data); #no need for a newline, we
have one at the last position
}

if you want, you could use $, set to ',' and then just
print @data at the end. Might be a little faster, but
I prefer being explicit.

That should work, but I didn't test it, so it may need
a little twiddling.

But you also caught my curiousity...what's with a 7
digit zipcode and what would the space do? I'm only
familiar with 5 digit, 9 digit, and 11 digit (DPBC)
codes (and none of those have spaces). I'm thinking
canadian postal codes, but I'm not sure.

-Jim......
--- "Dooley, Michael" <Dooley.Michael at con-way.com>
wrote:
> ok if you have a CSV file that has 12+ fields.
> on the 12th field you have a zipcode. if the Zip is
> 7 character put a space
> between the 4th and 5th character.
> 
> I don't know why I am having this brain blockage
> but:
> 
> 1) is there a better way to do the regex below?
> 2) how do I do the inline edit?
> 
> what I have below works but I know there has to be a
> much better way to edit
> the zipcode.
> 
> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
> 
> use strict;
> 
> while (<> ) {
> if
>
(/(\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,\w*,)(\w*)(.*)/)
> {
>         if (length($2) == 7) {
>                 my $zipstart=substr($2,0,4);
>                 my $zipend=substr($2,4,3);
>                 print "$1$zipstart $zipend$3\n";
>                 next;
>         }
> 
>         print "$1$2$3\n";
> }
> }
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