concating problem

[doubtingben]

Hi,
I am at my wits end here. I am trying to change a date format from month/day/year to year-month-day. Easy right? This works as expected:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
my $string = "9/1/2001";
my ($month, $day, $year) = split('/', $string);
my $new_date = join('-', $year, $month, $day);
print "$new_date\n";

but this doesn't :

...
my $string = $line[11];
my ($month, $day, $year) = split('/', $string);
my $new_date = join('-', $year, $month, $day);
...

$new_date becomes: "-month-day". I tried:
$new_date = $year.'-'.$month.'-'.$day;

But I get the same result. After some experimentation, it seems the month is starting at the beginning of the string, and overwriting everything after it. During debugging, I see the split works fine, I just can't seem to put it back together correctly.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Thanks.

The worst feeling?
Realizing what you thought was true, is not.

[Thelonius]

chomp($string);

Update: I really should add that if the string contains just a '\r' (and it looks like it might), chomp won't actually work. You'll have to $string =~ s/\r//g; or $string =~ tr/\r//d;

[doubtingben]

Thanks, $string =~ s/\r//g; worked. I did already have a chomp in there, with this addition, life makes sense again.

[krujos]

Have you checked that $line[11] really contains the date? It looks like your missing the year field (i.e. the string contains month/day).
update: fixed formatting

[Mr. Muskrat]

gbarr has given us Date::Parse so that we do not need to do this sort of thing (splitting dates that is). (Date::Manip would work too but it's a bit big for such a simple project.)

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Date::Parse;
my $string = "9/1/2001";
my ($day,$month,$year) = (strptime($string))[3..5];
$month++;
$year+=1900;
my $new_date = join('-', $year, $month, $day);
print $new_date,$/;