Extracting Header

[raj8]

Monks, I have been attempting to open a file and cut out the header which covers about 3 lines in the file. At that point I just extract the relevant information. However, I can't find a function to cut this header out..

[kvale]

I'm not sure what you mean by cut out the header, but here is a way to ignore it. Suppose header lines start with an octothorpe  #:

open FILE, "<file.txt" or die "Couldn't open file.txt: $!";
while (<FILE>) {
   if (/^#/) { # ignore the header
   }
   else {
      # Do some processing
   }
}

If your goal is to remove the header from the file, the easiest approach is to copy from the original file to a new file, leaving out the header lines in the process.

-Mark

[raj8]

For Example:

media   media  robot  robot  robot  side/  
------------------------------------------
000381  8MM    NONE&nbssp;  12     06/20/2002 16:44
000443  8MM    TL8      0    2     11/02/2001 13:12

[Chmrr]

I'm guessing that you want to "cut" the header lines out of the file, editing the file and leaving it with only the data in it. Here's the gradual evolution of something that will do that:

First off, we need to get a general plan. We want to read in the file line by line, and make a new file as we do so -- the trick is to not print the line if it's a header line. This means our new file will only have the data in it. So here's something that does that:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w;
open IN, "file.in" or die "file.in: $!";
open OUT, ">file.out" or die ">file.out: $!"
while (<IN>) {
  if ($_ =~ /^\d/) {
    print OUT $_;
  }
}
close IN;
close OUT;

Next step is to make this code a little classier. First off, we can use the -n and -i command line options to make this a lot shorter. The -n does the work of the while loop, and the -i does the word of making a new file, and then replacing the original. It'll even keep a backup for you! Here's what it looks like using -ni, then:

#!/usr/bin/perl -ni.bak
if ($_ =~ /^\d/) {
  print $_;
}

..Which can be condensed and made a lot more canonical:

perl -ni.bak -e 'print if /^\d/' file.dat

Voila!

Update: Manythanks to ChemBoy. I said -ni in two places, then gradually drifted off to saying -pi. Oopsie.

perl -pe '"I lo*`+$^X$\"$]!$/"=~m%(.*)%s;$_=$1;y^`+*^e v^#$&V"+@( NO CARRIER'