[SOLVED] perl scripts to change to uppercase and remove quotation marks.

enrollTN · 06-04-2013, 10:17 AM

Founds lots of examples in my search... however all it's doing is printing to the screen and not saving the file.

This is being ran with strawberry perl on windows 2008 server. The reason I'm here asking is 1. Most win admins would say use powershell, however i'm having a harder time getting it to work than perl.

here's what i have. Our filemaker database (don't laugh we're in the process of replacing it) generates a CSV file. However filemaker can't export in all caps. So I need to change this file, then ftp to another company.

1. Change all Text to Uppercase. I read and got the following to work:

Code:

perl -pe "$_= uc($_)" File1.csv > allcapsfile.txt

2. Remove the "'s from the file completely.

Code:

perl -pe s/\"//g allcapsfile.txt

This code just prints it to screen and not to a file. That's where I'm struggling.

I can remove the quotes using powershell but can't fix the caps. I guess I could write a .cmd that utilizes perl for one and powershell for the other... but I'd rather stick with one language.

If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it. If this is the wrong place on the forums I apologize and will move it asap.

TB0ne · 06-04-2013, 12:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by enrollTN

Founds lots of examples in my search... however all it's doing is printing to the screen and not saving the file.
This is being ran with strawberry perl on windows 2008 server. The reason I'm here asking is 1. Most win admins would say use powershell, however i'm having a harder time getting it to work than perl.

here's what i have. Our filemaker database (don't laugh we're in the process of replacing it) generates a CSV file. However filemaker can't export in all caps. So I need to change this file, then ftp to another company.

1. Change all Text to Uppercase. I read and got the following to work:

Code:

perl -pe "$_= uc($_)" File1.csv > allcapsfile.txt

2. Remove the "'s from the file completely.

Code:

perl -pe s/\"//g allcapsfile.txt

This code just prints it to screen and not to a file. That's where I'm struggling.

I can remove the quotes using powershell but can't fix the caps. I guess I could write a .cmd that utilizes perl for one and powershell for the other... but I'd rather stick with one language. If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it. If this is the wrong place on the forums I apologize and will move it asap.

I realize you've posted perl, and may have a requirement/desire to use it, but there are sometimes easier solutions. You can accomplish both with a single Linux command line, and not use ANY programming language. This:

Code:

tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' < File1.csv | sed 's/\"//g' > allcapsfile.txt

...turns everything into upper-case, and removes any double-quotes, and puts everything into a single output file, using only the tr and sed utilities, and Linux pipes/redirects. If this is something you do on a regular basis, you can even put that line into a shell-script, and have it 'watch' a specific directory, so any files that go IN, will be operated on automatically. A simple example, using inotifywait and a small do loop:

Code:

#!/bin/bash
inotifywait -m /some/path 2>&- | awk '$2 == "CREATE" { print $3; fflush() }' |
    while read file; do
        echo "$file is being processed"
        # Do your file operation here....
        tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' < $file.csv | sed 's/\"//g' > /path/for/output/$file.txt
        # ....and move the file after processing to a different location here....
        mv /some/path/$file.csv /some/backup/path/
    done