Extract data from pipe delimited text

[Anonymous Monk]

category1
category1|subcat1
category1|subcat1|subcat1
category1|subcat1|subcat2
category1|subcat1|subcat3
category1|subcat2
category1|subcat2|subcat1
category2

how would I just pull out the categories, "category1 category2", would I have to do somehing like !~ /^+.?\/

[Joost]

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
while(<DATA>){
        chomp;
   next unless /^([^\|]+)/;
   print "$1\n";
}
__DATA__
category1
category1|subcat1
category1|subcat1|subcat1
category1|subcat1|subcat2
category1|subcat1|subcat3
category1|subcat2
category1|subcat2|subcat1
category2

What does this have to do with MySQL?

-- 
Joost       downtime n. The period during which a system
            is error-free and immune from user input.

[simeon2000]

If I remember correctly (which doesn't always happen), I believe Mysql STDOUT query output (which is what you, I believe, are parsing), uses "\s+|\s+" in between columns. Unless you are just talking about a flat file with pipe as the delimeter that you can THEN slap into mysql, wherein I believe

while (my $line = <>) {
    my $category = split("|", $line, 1);
    # ...
}

would get the job done.

[Nightblade]

m/^(\w+)\|(\w+)/;
$cat1 = $1;
$cat2 = $2;