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in reply to Re: Get me excited about perl
in thread Get me excited about perl

I'll have to chime in with temporal: I think that CPAN is the best initial draw. The capabilities of the language help make it stay great.

The example I usually use to "hook" people with perl is a stripped down version of my SQL_2_excel script. The stripped down version isn't fancy, but shows how easily you can get data from a database and into a spreadsheet:

#!/usr/bin/perl # # Create a spreadsheet from an SQL query. # use strict; use warnings; use DBI; use Spreadsheet::WriteExcel; my $DSN = shift; my $usr = shift; my $pwd = shift or die "Missing argument(s)!"; # Attach to database and run query my $DB=DBI->connect($DSN,$usr,$pwd); my $ST=$DB->prepare(<<EOSQL); select MID, DBA, LastName, FirstName from customers where balance_due > 100 EOSQL $ST->execute; # Create a new workbook and worksheet my $xWB = Spreadsheet::WriteExcel->new('MySpreadsheet.xls'); my $xWS = $xWB->add_worksheet("Results"); # Add column headers (use column headers from query results) my $R=0; my $C=0; $xWS->write($R, $C++, $_) for @{$ST->{NAME}}; # Read the query results and write them into the spreadsheet while (my $ar=$ST->fetchrow_arrayref) { ++$R; $C=0; $xWS->write($R, $C++, $_) for @$ar; }

It doesn't have much in the way of features (no error checking to speak of, no formatting and/or null handling, etc.). But it's easy to see what's going on and shows that you don't need much code for some basic tasks.

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.