Re: first perl script...help anyone?

Meriadoc Overhill of Nobottle wrote:
> HI all,

Hello,

> I.m very new to Perl, but I've been told it's such a powerful language
> for text processing I wanted to try it and learn. So, I'm writing my
> first script which I need to process some text file.

Welcome.

> Basically that's what I want to do: I have 3 files, I want to read
> some informations from the first 2, and then write on the third. In
> depth, I want to read every line from the first and retrieve that line
> (or part of it) in a line of the second. Now, in the second file, I
> want to read all the lines subsequent to the line retrieved untile a
> termination charachter is found (in my case, when a line equal to the
> dot (".") is met) and print some infos in third. I want to repeat the
> operation until all the lines from the first line are ended.
> That's what I wrote, but it doesn't work, in particular the variable
> $count is always equal to 1. THat means it's not reading oll the lines
> from the first file.
>
> !/usr/local/bin/perl -w

The first two characters (at least on *nix systems) have to be '#!'.
And that line should be followed by the warnings and strict pragmas.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;


> open(FILEWRITE, ">write_seg06091999.txt")|| die "Could not open
> $write_seg06091999.txt\n";
> #open(FILESEG, "seg06091999.txt")|| die "Could not open
> $seg06091999.txt\n";
> #open(FILEALIGN, "walign06091999.txt")|| die "Could not open
> $walign06091999.txt\n";
> open(FILESEG, "seg_short.txt")|| die "Could not open seg_short.txt\n";
> open(FILEALIGN, "align_short.txt")|| die "Could not open align-
> short.txt\n";

You should include the $! variable in the error messages so you know why
open failed.

perldoc perlvar


> $count = 1;
> my $line_align = " ";
>
> ## read every line of a file
> while ($line_seg = ) {
>
> while($line_align = ){

When you read the first line via you then read through the
entire second file so when you get to the second and every subsequent
line from this loop will be bypassed as will
always return undef.


> if($line_align =~ /19990609_1900_1920_inter_fm_dga.$count/){

In a regular expression the character '.' means that you want to match
any character at that position. If you want to match a literal '.'
character you have to escape it /\./. The end of the pattern is not
anchored so if $count contains '1' then it will also match '10', '11',
'12345', etc.


> do{
>
> if($line_align ne "."){
> $line_align = ;
> print FILEWRITE $line_align, "$count\n";
> }
> }until $line_align eq ".";

Do you really need to check for $line_align being equal to '.' twice in
the same while loop?


> last;
> }
> }
> $count = $count+1;
>
> }
>
> you have some ideas why it's not working?
> probably ny programming style and my explantion sucks, so feel free to
> ask for more clear explanations...

It would help if we could see what your data looks like.


John
--
Perl isn't a toolbox, but a small machine shop where you
can special-order certain sorts of tools at low cost and
in short order. -- Larry Wall

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