perl input field separator

Tinkster · 10-18-2004, 01:15 PM

Lasses and Gents,

What special variable in perl holds the input field
separator? Analogous to awk's FS ... I found
references for the record separator(s) and an
output field separator, but nothing about input
field separators ...

Thanks a bunch!

Cheers,
Tink

acid_kewpie · 10-18-2004, 01:25 PM

$INPUT_RECORD_SEPERATOR
$RS
or even
$/

depending on how clever you are..... or think you are...

acid_kewpie · 10-18-2004, 01:27 PM

erm.. ok you wanted a field seperator... i give up, what's the difference??

and you know i've still
never got round to
understanding quite
why you always seem
to write your posts
just like this.

Tinkster · 10-18-2004, 02:10 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by acid_kewpie
erm.. ok you wanted a field seperator... i give up, what's the difference??

I want to write a little script to do analysis on
the current mail-queue and take action on it
if necessary ... every once in a while we get
hit by mails that pass spam-assassins filters
(very conservative settings) and bring postfix
to a crawl ...

The mailq output is a set of multi-line records,
I need to treat 1 or more blank lines as a record
separator, and a simple newline as a field.

The default behaviour of awk and perl would be
to have a line as a record, and whitespace delimited
"words" as fields.

Quote:

and you know i've still
never got round to
understanding quite
why you always seem
to write your posts
just like this.

I do it slightly wider (approximately 60 chars, I found)
and I do it because I find it easier to read and more
pleasant to the eye :)

Cheers,
Tink

acid_kewpie · 10-18-2004, 03:34 PM

Code:

one
one
one

two
two

three
three
three
three

four

plus

Code:

use strict;
open (LIST, "list");
$/ = "\n\n";
my $x;
while (<LIST>) {
  print "=======\n";
  foreach (split "\n", $_) {
    print "++" . $_ . "\n";
  }
}
close LIST;

equals

Code:

=======
++one
++one
++one
=======
++two
++two
=======
++three
++three
++three
++three
=======
++four

that's the sort of split you are after right?

Tinkster · 10-18-2004, 04:08 PM

Yep :}

Thanks a truckload! And man, perl sure is
cryptic ;} ... since I'm not 100% certain
whether records will be separated by one
or several blank lines I can even use $/=""
rather than "\n\n" ...

Brilliant!

Cheers,
Tink