Re: Extractiing data with Perl

[Ahmad Kamal <eng_ak at link dot net>]

I Don't know perl, but if u want to get the job done awk emerges from the 
dust :) Try the following dirty awk line:

gawk 'BEGIN {RS="(\n)?<option"}; {tmp=tmp "<option" $0 "</option>" "\n"} 
END {print tmp}' countries.txt

BTW, save ur file in UNIX text format (b4 awk or perl), this may be what's 
messing up ur perl script.

Good luck!

At 08:49 AM 29-04-03, you wrote:

> Salam,
> I'm using Active State's Perl 5.8 on my Win2K AS machine.
> I have a file that has a list of countries as an option list which I
> want to extract, and put each option in a line and add a closing
> </option> tag.
> After trying for hours I got this script, which worked fine except that
> it repeats any line that has an ending \n (newline).
> ---- Begin Perl script ----
> #!/usr/bin/perl
> while (<STDIN>) {
>   while (m/(<option[\w\s=\"]*>[\w\s\d&#;]+)/gi){
>     chomp();
>     print "$1</option>\n";
>   }
> }---- End Perl script ----
> I'm running the script as:
> #perl extract.pl < countries.txt
>
> Can any one please help, and also explain some things:
> * How can I use \G (explained as: matches were the previous m//g left
> off)?
> * What is the difference between using chop() and chomp()?
>
> I read through the manual but just couldn't figure it out.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Ossama Khayat