Extract data from pipe delimited text

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

category1
category1|subcat1
category1|subcat1|subcat1
category1|subcat1|subcat2
category1|subcat1|subcat3
category1|subcat2
category1|subcat2|subcat1
category2
[download]

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

Comment on Extract data from pipe delimited text Download Code

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Re: Extract data from pipe delimited text by Joost (Canon) on Jul 19, 2002 at 15:05 UTC
`#!/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` [download] 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.` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Extract data from pipe delimited text by Nightblade (Beadle) on Jul 19, 2002 at 15:04 UTC
`m/^(\w+)\\|(\w+)/; $cat1 = $1; $cat2 = $2;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Extract data from pipe delimited text by simeon2000 (Monk) on Jul 19, 2002 at 16:21 UTC
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); # ... }` [download] would get the job done.	[reply] [d/l]

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