CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowspathperl
Rolnik
Rolnik

Reputation: 121

'open' statement in Perl splits path having spaces - how to read a file with spaces in path?

I've been banging my head against this same wall for 48 hours. How do you pass a command line argument to Perl so that when Perl has the opportunity to open the file, it properly handles the Windows-style spaces that occur in a) directories or b) file names:

# open( PRELIM, "\"$ifile\"") or die "Cannot open $ifile";
# open( PRELIM, '\"$ifile\"') or die "Cannot open $ifile";
## Both these lines cannot deal with a space present in the path:
# open PRELIM, $ifile or print "\n* Couldn't open ${ifile}\n\n" && return;
# $ifile = qq($ifile);  Doesn't help, still leaves the file as if it was 'two' files
#
  # Quotes around $ifile do no good either
open( PRELIM, $ifile) or die "Cannot open $ifile"

Generally, the above line is correct until there is a space present in the variable '$ifile'.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 5793

Answers (5)

januw a
januw a

Reputation: 2256

my $rootDir = shift @ARGV;
$rootDir =~ s/\p{space}/\\ /g;

Upvotes: 0

Vert
Vert

Reputation: 11

I'm not too familiar with Perl, but I was able to look around and I found a forum post that may help you: http://www.tek-tips.com/viewthread.cfm?qid=376686&page=567

They are discussing the exact issue you are having and the first person in there suggested using single quotes instead of double to use a string literal so $DIRECTORY = 'C:\Documents and Settings';

instead of 

$DIRECTORY = "C:\Documents and Settings";

I hope this helps!

Upvotes: 1

JayM
JayM

Reputation: 11

Ensure you are also not using any reserved characters in your filename either.

I made that mistake of using a question mark as a default field value which only materialised in the filename as an issue !

Upvotes: 1

mu is too short
mu is too short

Reputation: 434965

You want the three argument form of open():

open(PRELIM, '<', $ifile) or die "Cannot open $ifile"    # For reading
open(PRELIM, '>', $ifile) or die "Cannot open $ifile"    # For writing

Always use the three argument version of open() to avoid issues like this.

Upvotes: 3

Pascal Cuoq
Pascal Cuoq

Reputation: 80355

To pass a command-line argument as a single argument that also contains spaces, enclose it within quotation marks. For example:

  perl script-name.pl "C:\My path with spaces"

This will cause the parameter to be handled as a single word.

(Within your code, if you're hard-coding back-slashes, then you need to double them up since "\" is a special meta-character, hence "\" will be converted to "\" at compile-time.)

Upvotes: 4

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