Kozz has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
Most esteemed monks:
I'm wrestling with this bit of code... I have modified the record separator, but I think it's interfering with my replacement regex. This should be darn simple, but I can't make it work. It's quite a simple concept: make the record separator ";\n" and filter-out all lines that start with a # -- comments.
#!/usr/bin/perl $/ = ";\n"; while (my $line = <DATA> ){ $line =~ s/^#[^\r\n]*//g; # get rid of any comments print "Query: $line\n"; } __DATA__ # one comment # two comment # another comment insert into table_name values(1, 'testing 1 2 3'); # more comments insert into table_name values (2, 'test •');
Yes, the file I'm reading is SQL stuff. But I'm not directly importing it with mysql tools because I cannot - they're not available. So I'm doing it the "hard way". I think that perhaps I have to do a "local $/" inside the while loop to change the rec_sep which affects my regular expression, but I'm not sure. I want to make sure that neither a too-lenient record separator will mangle the second insert (which contains a semicolon in a value), nor will the comment-deleting line mangle the second insert which also contains a pound-symbol (octothorpe).
What the heck am I overlooking? It doesn't take care of all the comments, just the stuff anchored to the beginning of the entire string. I must be using anchors wrong, or using the pattern modifiers incorrectly. I've monkeyed with them but with no luck. I thought I had regex basics whipped, but clearly I don't. I feel so humbled.