Writing data into columns

[$new_guy]

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[psini]

And your question is?

Please see How do I post a question effectively?.

[toolic]

• Read perlintro
• Write some code which tries to do what you want.
• If you still have problems, post the code you have tried.
• Clarify the description of your problem. I do not understand how you get that output from that input.

[graff]

To expand a bit on that last point raised by toolic above: I have reason to suspect that your "Desired output" might contain some typos (missing numbers, bad spacing, etc). But it would be unwise for me to guess at what the correct form should be, because I have no way of knowing that. I'm just reacting to some apparent discrepancies in your "data" that aren't explained in your "description".

Also, when you say "... the numbers ... could have letters in them ... the numbers/entryes ... could have letters and hyphens in them ...", it really is impossible for us to make any sense of this, unless you actually show some relevant examples of actual input and (correct) desired output.

Apart from that, you will need to show some perl code that you have tried.

[davido]

This feels like one of those IQ tests where you have to look at a sequence and figure out what comes next. Unlike those tests, the more I look at your desired output, the less I understand how it relates to the input.

[dasgar]

As others have eluded to, you haven't given enough information for others to understand what you're trying to do and/or where you're encountering problems. I'll venture a guess that you're wanting formatted output. If I'm right, you'll want to check out sprintf. However, if you need more help than that, you've got to take the first step and provide more information.

[JavaFan]

Assuming your example contains some typos, you may want to go for:

use 5.010;

use strict;
use warnings;

use List::Util 'max';

my (%data, %all, @keys);
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @chunks = split;
    my $key = shift @chunks;
    push @keys, $key unless exists $data{$key};
    foreach my $chunk (@chunks) {
        $data{$key}{$chunk}++;
        $all{$chunk} = 1;
    }
}

my @fields = sort {$a <=> $b} keys %all;
my $l = max map {length} @fields;

foreach my $key (@keys) {
    while (keys %{$data{$key}}) {
        print $key, " ";
        foreach my $field (@fields) {
            if ($data{$key}{$field}) {
                printf "%${l}s ", $field;
                delete $data{$key}{$field} unless --$data{$key}{$field
+};
            }
            else {
                printf "%${l}s ", "-";
            }
        }  
        print "\n";
    }
}


__DATA__
0. 1 1 7 2 2 9 4 6 8 10 2
1. 10 1 6 3 4 9
2. 5 8 59 77 81 3
3. 16 17 19 23 3

The result:

0.  1  2  -  4  -  6  7  8  9 10  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 
0.  1  2  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 
0.  -  2  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 
1.  1  -  3  4  -  6  -  -  9 10  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 
2.  -  -  3  -  5  -  -  8  -  -  -  -  -  - 59 77 81 
3.  -  -  3  -  -  -  -  -  -  - 16 17 19 23  -  -  -

Changing the sorting of fields if you have non-numeric fields is left as an exercise to the reader.