Removing blank/empty lines

[perlnoobster]

Hi Perl monks,

I was wondering if someone could help me, I have some coding that generates a text file, however there are blank rows that are being generated too, I just want to omit them and tried chomp but it didn't work so I tried using push @Results,$_ unless ($_ eq "\n"); and that didn't work, please can someone help me?

open (IN, "$output") or die "I couldn't get at $output";

my @Top_URLs = <IN>;

foreach my $URL (@Top_URLs)
{
my $final_page = get "$URL";#grab the link urls get $url


my @Results =();
push @Results,$_ unless ($_ eq "\n");


for my $Results (@Results)

{


if ($Results =~ s/.*\///) {
    print OUT2    "$Results\n";       
    
}
}
}

[toolic]

Tip #2 from the Basic debugging checklist: print the value of the $_ variable in your foreach loop. Does it contain what you expect?

print "$_\n";

[perlnoobster]

hi, thank you for replying, it does not show what I expect it to. it indicates a syntax error near ") print"? Please keep in mind that I am very new to perl and learning bits and pieces :)

[thmsdrew]

Make sure you put it inside the loop. The "{ }" brackets contain everything that's inside of your loop.

[Anonymous Monk]

Syntax error it says. There's a close bracket before your print it says.

Look at the code. Is that the close bracket on your loop list? Did you put the new print inside the curly {}'s of your loop?

[marquezc329]

Hello perlnoobster,

"I just want to omit them and tried chomp but it didn't work ..."

This is because chomp is used to remove trailing strings (most often, newlines) from records. So instead of removing the blank line, it removes the trailing newline at the end of the blank line resulting in an empty string.

As stated by Anonymous Monk above, you could use a regex to rewrite

push @Results, $_ unless ($_ eq "\n")

like

push @Results, $_ unless /^\s*$/;

or even (depending on how much you trust your data),

push @Results, $_ unless /^$/;

Have a look at perlretut if you need help understanding basic regexs.

On a side note, your code will be much easier to read and debug if you adopt a style that uses proper indentation. The indentation will help you to better visualize conditional blocks and control structures, as well as help you to gain a better understanding of variable scope.

Here's a sample rewrite fixing the indentation with a few small modifications.

#!/usr/bin/perl

#Always
use strict;
use warnings;

#Use lexical variables instead of bareword filehandles
open my $in, "<", "input_file"
    or die "Couldn't read input_file: $!\n";

my @results;

while (<$in>) {
    chomp;
    push @results, $_ unless /^\s*$/;
}

#Close filehandle's when you're done with them.
close $in;

open my $out2, ">>", "output_file" 
    or die "Couldn't open output_file: $!\n";

for (@results) {
    print $out2 "$_\n" if s/.*\///;
}

close $out2;

[space_monk]

....or you could use grep (either within a Unix shell or the Perl grep function) to do the job for you. :-)

[Anonymous Monk]

Use a regex like /$\s*^/ to anchor the pattern at both ends and search for zero-or-more occurrences of a space character between.

[Athanasius]

Good idea, but back-to-front! In a regex, ^ matches the beginning of a line, and $ matches the end of a line. See Regular Expressions.

(I always used to get these mixed up, too. Maybe it’s because $ is generally used as a sigil, and therefore we get used to seeing it come first in identifiers?)

Update: I see that marquezc329 has already corrected this in Re: Removing blank/empty lines.