Bryan Harris wrote:
>
> Hi,
Hello,
> I've tried everything I can think of, but I feel like a 6th grader trying to
> solve a 7th grade math problem:
>
> I'm trying to build a "pretty-fier" for any tab-delimited text file
> (basically space-pad the columns so the decimals line up). I search through
> the columns finding the longest field with and highest precision level for
> each column, then create a format string for the printf command. The guts
> of it looks like this:
>
> **************************************
> $formatstr = "";
> $index = 0;
> foreach (@lwid) {
> $formatstr .= "%$lwid[$index].$lprec[$index]f".'\t';
> $index++;
> }
In idiomatic perl that would be written as:
foreach my $index ( 0 .. $#lwid ) {
$formatstr .= "%$lwid[$index].$lprec[$index]f\t";
}
> substr($formatstr,-2,2) = "";
> $formatstr .= '\n';
Why not use join() instead of adding an extra "\t" and removing it
later:
my $formatstr = join( "\t", map "%$lwid[$_].$lprec[$_]f", 0 .. $#lwid )
. "\n";
Also, instead of using two arrays for width and precision, it might be
simpler to use an array of arrays.
> open(FILE, ">$file$ext") || die("Couldn't create $file$ext: $!\n");
>
> foreach (@content) {
> @fields = split;
I assume that you are split()ing the input in order to measure the width
of each field so you could store the contents in an array of arrays to
avoid split()ing the data again here. Also you could pre-format the
data and avoid this foreach loop altogether.
> if (@fields) { printf FILE $formatstr, @fields; }
> else { print FILE $_; }
> }
>
> close(FILE);
> **************************************
>
> ... but that "printf" spits out actual "\t" and "\n"s. How can I get the
> printf to interpret those into tabs and newlines?
Put escape sequences in double quoted strings, not single quoted
strings, to have them interpolated properly.
John
--
use Perl;
program
fulfillment
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