CODEWITHSUNDEEP
perlparsingtabscsv
Igglyboo
Igglyboo

Reputation: 845

Parse tab delimited file in perl

So I'm a huge perl newbie but I'm trying to parse a tab delimited file into an array. The only problem i'm having is that my file has a varying amount of tabs used for spacing.

Right now im doing @data = split("\t"); but this only removes one tab, is there a way to remove all the tabs when parsing the file?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 6248

Answers (3)

user966588
user966588

Reputation:

You could go like this

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open (IN, '<' , 'tabsfile');
my @arr;

while(<IN>) {
        $_ =~ s/\s+/ /g;
        push @arr, $_;
}
close(IN);

Output:

]# cat tabsfile
lkjdlksajdlkajsd                kdjlkasjd                                ;lkwqd;wqd;qwkd;qwkd
                lkewjflkjewflewjflwjf                   lkewjflkejflewjf
djflkajfdljf    eljfdlewfjlewfj lkfjewlfkjewlkf lkdjewflkjewlkfjlkewjfew        dlkejfdlkjewflkjewlkfjjdlkajdflkjalfdjelfj
        dkjklfjldskjfldsjf lkjdslkfjdslkjf:wq

]# perl tabs.pl
lkjdlksajdlkajsd kdjlkasjd ;lkwqd;wqd;qwkd;qwkd  lkewjflkjewflewjflwjf lkewjflkejflewjf djflkajfdljf eljfdlewfjlewfj lkfjewlfkjewlkf lkdjewflkjewlkfjlkewjfew dlkejfdlkjewflkjewlkfjjdlkajdflkjalfdjelfj  dkjklfjldskjfldsjf lkjdslkfjdslkjf:wq 
]#

You could chose what to replace \t \s in regex.

Upvotes: 0

Mark Setchell
Mark Setchell

Reputation: 208003

Simply replace multiple tabs with single tabs throughout the string before split()

# A line with varying numbers of tabs
my $line="\t\tField1\tField2\t\t\t\t\tField3";

# Replace all occurences of one or more tabs with single tab
$line =~ s/\t+/\t/g;

# Now split()

Upvotes: 2

Hunter McMillen
Hunter McMillen

Reputation: 61540

You can split on a regular expression, so if you need to split on one or more tab characters use:

@data = split("\t+");

example (Perl debugger):

DB<1> $text = "one\ttwo\t\tthree\t\t\tfour"

DB<2> @data = split("\t+", $text)

DB<3> print join(", ", @data)
one, two, three, four

Upvotes: 4

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