Re: Cleaning Data Between Specified Columns

[Aragorn]

Taking one of the suggestions above, keeping your program flow intact, and mixing it a bit with my personal style, I come up with this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

# Store the ranges in a list of hashes.
my @Ranges = ();
foreach my $arg (@ARGV) {
    my ($start, $end) = split(/-/, $arg);
    push @Ranges, { start => $start, end => $end };
}

# Use standard input/output so we can pipe files through it.
while (my $line = <STDIN>) {
    # We go through the columns in reverse so the offsets will be
    # correct.
    foreach my $range (reverse @Ranges) {
        my ($start, $end) = ($range->{start}, $range->{end});
        my $line_len = length($line);
        $end = $line_len if $line_len < $end;
        next if $start > $end;  # Skip out-of-bound ranges

        my $nchars = $end - $start;
        substr($line, $start-1, $end-$start) =
          cleanse(substr($line, $start-1, $end-$start));
    }
    print $line;
}

# Remove apostrophes and other unwanted characters.
sub cleanse {
    my $string = shift;

    $string =~ s/'//g;
    $string =~ tr/a-zA-Z0-9\n\|\-/ /c;

    return $string;
}

It could use some extra checking on the program arguments (ranges), though.

Arjen