[Chicago-talk] messy scalar into an array.

[Clyde Forrester]

If your data is in fixed columns, you might just take the appropriate 
substrings and be done with it. Sometimes regular expressions aren't the 
most effective or easy to maintain solution. </heresy>

Clyde Forrester

Richard Reina wrote:
> Hi Brian,
> 
> I really appreciate the reply.  It looks promising, but it does not seem to trap any data.  If I put a print $mode . " " . $ident . " " . $file . "\n";
> after the matching statement nothing matches.  
> 
> 
> ---- Chicago.pm chatter <chicago-talk at pm.org> wrote:
>> As an alternative to fixed fields, how about:
>>
>> use strict;
>> my @received = `faxstat -r`;
>> my $line;
>> my ($mode, $ident, $time, $file);
>>
>> foreach $line (@received) {
>>     if (($mode, undef, undef, $ident, $time, $file) =
>>       ($line =~ 
>> /^(\S+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)\s+(\S.*\S)?\s+(..:..)\s+(.*\.tif)$/) {
>>         # do whatever
>>     }
>> }
>>
>> This should also deal with skipping irrelevant (fax title?) lines.
>>
>>   - Brian
>>
>> Richard Reina wrote:
>>> Actually, I believe all the suggestion would work until I realized 
>>> that every now in then there is a column that is completely blank and 
>>> then it throw everything off. Here is an example of the output:
>>>
>>> -rw---- 2  14  <UNSPECIFIED> 14:53 fax00003459.tif
>>> -rw---- 1  14  501 443 9393         14:58 fax00003460.tif
>>> -rw---- 1  14                              15:01 fax00002470.tif
>>>
>>> That occasional empty column messes it up.  Is there a way to 
>>> accommodate for that?
>>>
>>> Sorry, for the added wrinkle.  I had not noticed that before.
>>>
>>> Richard
>>> *
>>> *
>>>
>>>
>>>     On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Richard Reina
>>>     <richard at rushlogistics.com <mailto:richard at rushlogistics.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>         I'm sorry for asking what likely should be a simple question
>>>         but after spending a fair amount of time playing with qw(),
>>>         split(), join(), etc. I still have not figured it out.
>>>
>>>         I have some fairly messy system output which I have managed to
>>>         isolate into a scalar with
>>>
>>>         use strict;
>>>         my @received = `faxstat -r`;
>>>
>>>         I can't figure out how to neatly get this into an array so I
>>>         can get the output into a database table;
>>>
>>>         I've gotten this far;
>>>
>>>         my $line;
>>>         my @fax;
>>>
>>>         foreach $line (@received) {
>>>
>>>            if (substr($line,0,5) eq "-rw---") { # make sure it's an
>>>         actual fax
>>>                                                 # and not the title of
>>>         the output
>>>                chomp($line);
>>>            }
>>>         }
>>>
>>>         $line is exactly what I want but it's in the form of a scalar;
>>>          When I try to split it up into elements of an array with
>>>         @fax=split("", $line); it does not work due to all the back to
>>>         back white spaces.  If anyone can help me out with a better
>>>         way to do this I would really appreciate it.
>>>
>>>         Thanks,
>>>
>>>         Richard