In the writing of poetry, worthy of tribute
The most crucialistic part is the words in the poem.
Sure, rhyme, rhythm, meter, these all contribute
But if you make lousy word choices, people are going to read it and say "Who wrote this trash?" and then somebody says "GotToBTru" and then somebody says "Who's that?" and out of embarrassment they say "Don't know 'im."

Does Perl Monks have an official Poet Laureate?
We've got a section here for him, ready and warmed up.
Meanwhile, rank and file monks fill in with haiku and couplet
Waiting for a real class act to finally show up.

That's not me, I'm not a skilled nor prolific Perl Poetry contributor.
I much prefer coding, I'm not ashamed to admit it.
So it works out not to be much of a non sequitur
To say "GotToBTru. Your day job - don't quit it."

I am not sure if it is File::Find or grep that is responsible for the behavior I see.

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;

my $dir='/home/edi/wlsedi/howard/temp';

find({preprocess => sub { return grep { -M $_ < 1 } @_ },
        wanted => sub { printf "%s\n",$_ if (-f $_) }
    }, $dir);
[download]

Output(as expected):

file1
file2
file3
[download]

I would rather have the directory case handled in preprocess than wanted.

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;

my $dir='/home/edi/wlsedi/data_backup/univfiledrop';

find({preprocess => sub { return grep { -f $_ && -M $_ < 1 } @_ },
        wanted => sub { printf "%s\n",$_ }
    }, $dir);
[download]

Output:

.
file1
file2
file3
[download]

Why is . included?

Update

File::Find calls the wanted function with the directory name before it performs the readdir() on the directory. The preprocess routine is not called for this invocation.

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
my $p = 0;
my $dir='/home/edi/wlsedi/howard/temp';

find({preprocess => sub { printf "p %d %s\n",$p++,$_; return @_ },
        wanted => sub { printf "w %d %s\n",$p++,$_ }
    }, $dir);
[download]

ls -e /home/edi/wlsedi/howard/temp
total 0
drwxr-xr-x-    2 wlsedi   wlsedi          256 Jul 01 09:33 dirhere
-rw-r--r---    1 wlsedi   wlsedi            0 Jul 01 08:14 file1
-rw-r--r---    1 wlsedi   wlsedi            0 Jul 01 08:14 file2
-rw-r--r---    1 wlsedi   wlsedi            0 Jul 01 08:14 file3
[download]

Output:

w 0 .
p 1 .
w 2 file1
w 3 file2
w 4 file3
w 5 dirhere
p 6 dirhere
[download]

I put the following together to scrape experience, level and writeups off my profile page and store it in a text file on my computer, to record my progress through the Monastery. A scheduled task runs this once a day.

use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple;
use URI::URL;

my $date=`ECHO %DATE:~10,4%%DATE:~4,2%%DATE:~7,2%`; # YYYYMMDD

my $url = url('http://perlmonks.org/?node_id=844862');

my $content = get($url);
$content =~ s/\cJ//g;
$content =~ s/\cM//g;

my ($experience, $level, $posts) =
   ($content =~ /Experience:\D+(\d+).+
                 Level:.+([A-Z][a-z]+\s+\(\d+\)).+
                 Writeups:.+>(\d+)</x);

open my $ofh, '>>','perl_xp.dat';
printf $ofh "%d,%d,%d,%s\n",$date,$experience,$posts,$level;
close($ofh);
[download]

There is probably a way to do this in Javascript that could be included in the Free Nodelet, but that's beyond my skill level.

Update

Improved version here.

If I run the following code in the debugger:

use strict;

my $t = 14;
blah();
print "$t\n";

sub blah {
  my $t = 42;
  print "$t\n";
}
[download]

and I place a watch on $t, it applies to both the main program variable and the subroutine variable, even though they are distinct. When the assignment statement in the subroutine executes, it reports that the value changed from 14 to 42, which is not true. Perl is not confused, the values of the variables stay distinct, but the debugger can't keep the namespaces distinct. Or perhaps it can -- is there a way to tell the debugger I want to watch only the variable in the subroutine?

Also, if I make calls to modules, variables in my code go out of scope. If I am watching them, the debugger halts twice, once to tell me the variable now has no value, and once again to tell me it has reappeared! Is there a way to avoid these halts?

Neither of these issues is more than an annoyance, but just in case I'm missing something ...

Update: simplest solution here.

Latest challenge: file is in Rich Text Format. I don't need to parse it, or convert it into HTML. I just want the data, absent any formatting.

Here is my end result. The regexes could no doubt be tightened up.

use strict;
use warnings;
my ($wholefile,$line);
my $outfilename='orderdata.out';

{open INFILE, '<', "orderform.rtf";
 local $/; $wholefile=<INFILE>;
 close(INFILE);

 $wholefile =~ s/^\s*{.*\n//g;              # remove lines starting wi
+th braces
 $wholefile =~ s/\\[\w-]+\b//g;             # remove RTF commands
 $wholefile =~ s/(\n)\s+(\S+)/$1$2/g;       # remove extra spaces
 $wholefile =~ s/([^\\\n]+)\\(\n)/$1$2/g;   # get rid of \ at the ends
+ of lines
 $wholefile =~ s/\\\n//g;                   # get rid of lines with a 
+\ only

 open OUTFILE,'>',$outfilename or die "Can't open $outfilename!\n";
 print OUTFILE $wholefile;
 close(OUTFILE);
}
[download]

The question came up on a list dedicated to EDI (electronic data interchange) about how to recognize EDI data in a file. Interchanges formatted in accordance with ANSI X12 standards are made up of labeled, delimited records called segments.

A pair of segments form the outermost "envelope" around the data, the ISA and IEA segments. The ISA segment is 106 characters long, including the segment terminator character. The terminator tells you how to break the file into segments and another character, the element delimiter, tells how to break the segments into elements. This last is the 4th character in the ISA segment. These two characters, the segment terminator and element delimiter, are not specified in the standards and companies/industries use a variety of choices.

Ever since I first learned about Perl I figured it would be ideal for dealing with EDI files. I worked out a regexp for identifying an EDI file by the presence of this fixed length ISA segment. The result is the ability to recognize an X12 file, without knowing ahead of time which delimiter and terminator your trading partner chose, and it delivers them up to you as a side effect of recognition.

($elemdelim,$segterm) = ( $contents =~ 
            /ISA(.)..\1.{10}\1..\1.{10}\1..\1.{15}\1..\1.{15}\1.{6}\1.
+{4}\1.\1.{5}\1.?.{9}\1.\1.\1.(.)/);
[download]

It is said among X12 experts that the ISA is not fixed length. Element 14 is a 9 digit control number, which could be negative (according to the data type definition of the element but in complete contravention to the practical use of control numbers), in which case the ISA would be 107 characters long. This is silly, in my opinion, but is also easily dealt with using ".?".

I have also opted to use the . instead of \d or \w. That's just because I can't be bothered to type two characters when one will do.