Let me throw in some assumptions here (having to deal with quite a few other text-based formats at work):
- You can skip the headers, because they are standardized across files
- Everything before the first number (or minus sign) is the location name
- Data columns always contain a value
- The only column that can contain spaces is the location name
That means, we can just collapse spaces. We have to handle the location name special, but after that can use split to recover the columns:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
use Carp;
my @sites;
open(my $ifh, '<', 'eclipse.txt') or croak($!);
# Skip header
for(1..5) {
my $tmp = <$ifh>;
}
while((my $line = <$ifh>)) {
chomp $line;
next if($line eq ''); # Ignore empty lines
my %entry;
$line =~ s/\ +/ /g; # Collapse spaces
if($line =~ /^(.*?)\s[-\d]/) {
$entry{location} = $1;
# Remove location name
$line =~ s/^.*?\s([-\d])/$1/;
# Split along spaces
my @parts = split/\ /, $line;
foreach my $name (qw[long1 long2 lat1 lat2 elevation h m s PA
+Alt]) {
$entry{$name} = shift @parts;
}
push @sites, \%entry;
}
}
close $ifh;
print Dumper(\@sites);
That results in an array of hashes:
$VAR1 = [
{
's' => '59',
'elevation' => '0',
'long2' => '45.',
'lat2' => '55.',
'lat1' => '-36',
'location' => 'Auckland',
'm' => '33',
'h' => '4',
'long1' => '174',
'PA' => '313',
'Alt' => '13'
},
{
'h' => '4',
'm' => '40',
'PA' => '326',
'Alt' => '11',
'long1' => '173',
'lat2' => '35.',
'long2' => '55.',
's' => '34',
'elevation' => '30',
'location' => 'Blenheim',
'lat1' => '-41'
},
{
'h' => '4',
'm' => '42',
'PA' => '327',
'Alt' => '9',
'long1' => '175',
'lat2' => '35.',
'long2' => '25.',
's' => '28',
'elevation' => '0',
'location' => 'Cape Palliser',
'lat1' => '-41'
},
...