[oak perl] Oakland Digest, Vol 56, Issue 6

Tue Feb 19 12:35:49 PST 2008

What does -wpi.bak mean - thanks

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From: oakland-bounces+justin.tabatchnick=intel.com at pm.org
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Subject: Oakland Digest, Vol 56, Issue 6

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Today's Topics:

   1. Re: Oakland Digest, Vol 56, Issue 3 (Quinn Weaver)

   2. Re: Replace the tab delineator (Steve Kolupaev)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1

Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:14:47 -0800

From: Quinn Weaver <quinn at fairpath.com>

Subject: Re: [oak perl] Oakland Digest, Vol 56, Issue 3

To: oakland at pm.org

Message-ID: <20080218211447.GB43231 at fu.funkspiel.org>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

On Mon, Feb 18, 2008 at 11:19:25AM -0800, Tabatchnick, Justin wrote:

> Hi;

> 

> Need some help , I have to replace the tab delineator  with a
different

> character in a tab delineated file and was hoping someone might be
able

> to suggest a method and give an example in Perl. 

Hi, Justin,

This is a classic Perl problem--so much so that Perl provides several
shortcuts

to make solving it easier.

The basic solution is this:

perl -wpi.bak -e 's/\t/q/g' file1 file2 file3 # et cetera...

In this code, replace the q with the character you want.  If it's an
unprintable

character, you can represent it in hex:  \xFF, for example.  If you
decide

you want to replace each tab with two characters, you can do that too;

for instance, you could change the code say qu instead of q.

This assumes you are typing the command from a Unix shell.  If you use

Windows, I _think_ you need double quotes instead of single quotes.
(I'm

not sure about that, though; I don't have a Windows box on which to
test.)

For each file A, this code will create a file A.bak with the original

file contents (before replacing tabs).  This is a safeguard.  If you

don't want this behavior, just remove the ".bak" from that code.

That should do the trick.  If you wanted sophisticated error recovery,
you'd

have to write a real program, but, if all your files are readable and
all

your directories are writeable, this should be fine.

Hope that helps,

-- 

Quinn Weaver, independent contractor  |  President, San Francisco Perl
Mongers

http://fairpath.com/quinn/resume/     |  http://sf.pm.org/

510-520-5217

------------------------------

Message: 2

Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:27:20 -0800

From: Steve Kolupaev <skolupae at sonic.net>

Subject: Re: [oak perl] Replace the tab delineator

To: Oakland Perl Mongers <oakland at pm.org>

Message-ID: <47BA1458.20302 at sonic.net>

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed

Tabatchnick, Justin wrote:

> Hi;

> 

> Need some help , I have to replace the tab delineator  with a
different

> character in a tab delineated file and was hoping someone might be
able

> to suggest a method and give an example in Perl. 

> 

> Thanks

> 

> Justin Tabatchnick

> Intel Corporation

>   

Justin,

This is a classic beginning exercise in Perl. Someone on the list can 

probably point out an excellent example already worked out. Here's my 

quick take, providing all the details. This changes the delimiter from 

TAB to "!", with hard-coded filenames

and no error checking.

$input_file = "xxxxx.txt";

$output_file = "yyyyy.txt";

open( FH, $input_file );

open( OFH, ">$output_file");

while ( <FH> ) { s/\t/!/g; print OFH }

Perhaps you just want to get this done, and don't really want to write a

program. In that case, the Gnumeric spreadsheet program should do a fine

job. Gnumeric is part of Gnome Office, which you can get for Ubuntu and 

SuSE linux. There is Windows build of Gnumeric also. If memory serves, 

MS Excel can also save to a text file with your choice of column
delimiter.

Assuming you are have Gnumeric on Linux:

First start Gnumeric. In Ubuntu or Suse: just type gnumeric ENTER

from a shell window. Once the GUI starts, you do to following:

Data-> Get External Data -> Import Text File

select the input file

hit Open

hit Forward

select the delimiter character if not already correct

hit Forward

hit Finish

and your input spreadsheet is internalized by Gnumeric.

Now save with a different separator character like this:

Hit File

Hit Save As

set the output file name, set File type to "text export (configurable)"

Hit Save

select the new separator character from dropdown list or input box

Click Save

and you're done.

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End of Oakland Digest, Vol 56, Issue 6

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