How to Parse a Value in Perl
As a dynamic programming language, Perl is seen as somewhat advanced, although it can be used for a number of purposes. It was originally based as a Unix scripting language to make report generation easier and is still used today for similar reasons. Parsing data in Perl means to analyze it and reformat it into another format that may be used in a different application or for a different reason. Raw data can be difficult to view on its own and Perl scripts can help organize data and parse it into more palatable terms, especially for non-technical users. For this example, we will assume that we want to parse a value that is someone's contact information.
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Instructions
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Open the text file containing the values that you want to parse. For example, there may be only one column of data that contains phone numbers that you wish to sort numerically. We will assume the title of this column is named "phone" for the sake of the example.
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Open your text editor to begin writing the Perl script.
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Write "open (FILE, 'filename.txt');". Replace "filename" with the filename of the data with which you are working.
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Enter into the next line of the script and write:
while (<FILE>) {
chomp;
($phone) = split ("\t"):
print "Phone Number: $phone\n";
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Close the script with the following to conclude it:
}
close (FILE);
exit;
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Access the parsed data file in the same directory in which the original was saved. Open up the new file and verify that the values were parsed as you expected.
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Tips & Warnings
You can use a number of different Perl functions to parse values; it just depends what you are trying to accomplish and how much data with which you are working.
