Perl! array/file access question

Chubby

Lo, learning a bit of Perl at the moment and I'm having problems accessing the elements in an array.

This is what I want to do. Read and store all the lines of a file into an array (this is easy). Save a sentence stored in the array into a string, split the string into an array of words and then access each element. The code looks like this...


#!/usr/local/bin/perl
open (FILE1, "file1.txt");
@list = <FILE1>;
close (FILE1);

@subarray = split (/ /, $list[0]);
print ("Start...\n");
print ("@subarray\n&quot;
print ("Element 0 = $subarray[0]\nElement 1 = $subarray[1]");
print ("End.\n");

****file1.txt****
Just a sample sentence in this file.


Output I get when I run the script is....

Start...
Justasamplesentenceinthisfile.
Element 0 =
Element 1 =
End.


The split seems to have gone ahead but when I access the subarray elements it's blank. This doesn't happen if the sentences were read from standard inputline instead of taking from an array from a file. Anyone know why this happens and how to fix it?



[This message has been edited by Chubby (edited 03-04-2000).]

Shiminay

Originally posted by Chubby:

@subarray = split (/ /, $list[0]);

You're adding all the stuff into one array element. You'll want to do a while loop and assign the values into each element one at a time.

---

All the best,

Dav
@B^)
http://homepage.eircom.net/~davitt

Chubby

Originally posted by Kharn:
You're adding all the stuff into one array element. You'll want to do a while loop and assign the values into each element one at a time.

Hmm, I think you are right but this works if the line I am splitting is not part of an array.

The codes below for example works perfectly. It adds all the words from the split function into seperate array elements. This is some bloody odd behaviour.

$line = <STDIN>;
@subarray = split(/ /, $line);
print ("$subarray[0],$subarray[1],$subarray [2] etc");

Chubby

That still doesn't let me do what I want to do. The original code should work but it's putting everything into the last accessed element of the subarray! Any ideas how to do this?

Shiminay

Are you sure you've got the split function right? Is it not:
@subarray = split ' ', $line;

This will split by spaces I think. I've see the // you have in your example in places in the book (The Camel Book) I'm using, so maybe both are acceptable.

Thing is, I'm as new to this language as you seem to be I am however a programmer of other languages and code is code

Let me know how you get on.

---

All the best,

Dav
@B^)
http://homepage.eircom.net/~davitt

Chubby

Originally posted by Kharn:
Are you sure you've got the split function right? Is it not:
@subarray = split ' ', $line;

This will split by spaces I think. I've see the // you have in your example in places in the book (The Camel Book) I'm using, so maybe both are acceptable.

Thing is, I'm as new to this language as you seem to be I am however a programmer of other languages and code is code

Let me know how you get on.

Yeah I found out what I was doing wrong. The lines in the txt file all have multiple spaces between the words. The split function was only looking for 1 space.

The correct code should be
@subarray = split (/ +/, $list[0]);
The + sign makes it grab as many spaces as it can etc. You confused me with the loop suggestion but thanks for the help.

Shiminay

Ah, g'man. I've only been reading the books - not delved into any "hello world"'s yet (been too busy!)

Good too see it's sorted

---

All the best,

Dav
@B^)
http://homepage.eircom.net/~davitt

Kali

with the split function if you dont specify the pattern match // then it uses white space... so theres never any need to use the ' ' or " ".

quickest way of printing out each element along with its position in the array:

$c = 0;
foreach (@a) {print "Element: $c "; print; $c++}

Shiminay

Now why didn'tyou just post that a couple of days ago???

Cheers

---

All the best,

Dav
@B^)
http://homepage.eircom.net/~davitt