Re: How do I combine SPLIT with trimming white space

[Marshall]

I tried to post before and for some reason it didn't work.
I dunno why not.

Anyway this is a different approach. Have fun!

#!usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# I suspect that you left off a ";" after Boop, Elizabeth PHD
# I add added that to the test data below.

my $file_data =qq(
  Builder, Bob  ;Stein, Franklin MSW; Boop, Elizabeth PHD ; Cc: Bear, 
+Izzy;  
  SomeGuy,  Guy;  Einstein  , Albert  PHD; );
#
#yes, you can open a scalar for read with a filehandle!
#there is some "weirdness" about this, but the idea does work!
  
open (my $in, "<", \$file_data) or die "can't open input file $!";

while (my $line =<$in>)
{
    next if $line =~ m/^\s*$/;    # skip blank lines
    chomp ($line);
    $line =~ s/CC://i;
    $line =~ s/\s+$//;   #gets rid of trailing \n
                         #I suspect that this is an artifact
                         #of the way the file is opened??
                         
    my @whole_name_titles = split(/;/,$line);
    
    foreach my $name (@whole_name_titles)
    {
       $name =~ s/\s+[A-Z]+\s*$//; #Skip trailing cap letters
       $name =~ s/\s+//g;          #compress spaces
       print "$name\n";            #push to DB or whatever here...
    }   
}

__END__
Prints:
Builder,Bob
Stein,Franklin
Boop,Elizabeth
Bear,Izzy
SomeGuy,Guy
Einstein,Albert

[Grey Fox]

Hi Marshall
One of the reasons there was no semi colon after Betty, was that she was at the end of the original e-mail To: list. One of the things I wanted to do is just pull the To: and CC: as one cut and paste. That leaves a new line between the last name and the first CC: the original code changes the CC: to a semi colon.
Also part of the original requirements is a sorted list. Thanks though, some nice ideas.

[Marshall]

Grey Fox,
Glad you got some good ideas from this thread!

I thought something was weird with the missing semicolon - just a small detail.

As far as sorting goes print "$name\n"; #push to DB or whatever here... is where you can just push to a list like @full_names. Here is one way of many to do the sort. Note that the "Boop" family winds up in the correct sort order.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @names = 
 (
     "Builder,Bob",
     "Stein,Franklin",
     "Boop,Elizabeth",
     "Boop,Albert",
     "Bear,Izzy",
     "SomeGuy,Guy",
     "Einstein,Albert",);
   
@names = sort by_last_name @names;

print join("\n",@names),"\n";

sub by_last_name
{
   my ($a_last, $a_first) = split (/,/,$a);
   my ($b_last, $b_first) = split (/,/,$b);
           $a_last cmp $b_last
                   or
           $a_first cmp $b_first        
}

__END__
Prints:
Bear,Izzy
Boop,Albert
Boop,Elizabeth
Builder,Bob
Einstein,Albert
SomeGuy,Guy
Stein,Franklin

I added the simple code to sort by first name.
Read more... (1443 Bytes)