Perl Array element manipulation

The_B_Man

hey, I've looked around online for examples but cant get any. i was wondering if any one can help me with this, what seems to be easy, problem?

basically, i am reading in a sentence like "Hello World" but i need to be able to deal wit each individual letter separately.

i tried reading it into an array but had trouble with that for some reason. then tried reading into a variable then putting the variable into an array but the element 1 was "Hello world" as opposed to "H".

Is it possible to read directly into an array in perl from STDIN? or are there other ways to read in letters and spaces seperately? can chomp or any of them functions be used?

sorry for all the questions, but i dont have much experience in perl!

TIA.

democrates

Do you really need an array?
Would looping through the string read from stdin and using substr to select each character in turn do the job?

The_B_Man

coz for each letter of the alphabet, i have another arrray filled wit corresponding values that they need to be converted to. though, now that i look at it, i suppose it could be done that way to. I never used that substr before so ill give it a go and let yis know. fell free to post any more ideas.

also, i was considering a hash thing for converting the alphabet. maybe theres an easier way doing it that way?

democrates

Is this like a substitution cipher where every character read in is replaced by one in the substitution array?

In any event the split function will convert your input string into an array.

The_B_Man

well I used the substr function like u said so im able to extract every character using a while loop.

I now hav a hash table (or watever its called) wit values such as 'A' => 'x1', 'B' => 'x2' etc etc.

wat i need to do now is convert, say, "ABBA" to "x1 x2 x2 x1" and vice versa. i'm looking over hashes now and it seems relatively straight forward. hopefully it is! haha

Zaltais

The following is the easiest way to seperate every character into an array.
(The 'use Data:: Dumper;' and 'print Dumper(\@array);' lines are purely to ilustrate the array...)

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my $value = "Hello World\n";

chomp $value;

my @array = split(//, $value);

print Dumper(\@array);

I'll leave you to figure hashes out for yourself, but post back if you've any problems.

tommycahir

I ahve found the answer to most of my perl questions can be answered hereperl monks. they have quiet an extensive thread history and a simple search will bring up an answer to most questions

Hope it helps anyway

The_B_Man

thanks ill try perl monks.

at the moment i actually have it working one way. i can convert sentences, but the problem is converting it back the other way.

whats the perl code for saying:

if its alphabetic then do this

else do that

i tihnk its like

if [a-z][A-Z]
{
etc...
}
else
{
bleh...
}

am i on the right track?

tommycahir

if you put the code that you have done and let us have a look at it then we might be able to help you a little bit more that just giving you links etc.