ChOas has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
A collegue of mine is working on parsing a file, which
is part of a database... The person that wrote this
database has kinda screwed up, because he/she used 1 field
for 3 values, I`ll explain:
In The Netherlands, a surname CAN be prepended by (amongst
others) one of the following:
'VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN' ...
I have no clue what this is called in English, but
I would like to call it a 'prependition' :)
Anyways... The fields in every line are:
NAME<Mandatory> PREPENDITION<maybe> HAVENT_GOT_A_CLUE<maybe>
I wanted to help, and I`ve tried different ways to parse
this, and I only have a little sample data, but I came up
with this:
It works for my sample data, but I can already think of
cases where it won`t work... and... I have a gut-feeling
this can be done better (I`m not a regex-wiz) ...
Any pointers ?
GreetZ!,
print "profeth still\n" if /bird|devil/;
is part of a database... The person that wrote this
database has kinda screwed up, because he/she used 1 field
for 3 values, I`ll explain:
In The Netherlands, a surname CAN be prepended by (amongst
others) one of the following:
'VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN' ...
I have no clue what this is called in English, but
I would like to call it a 'prependition' :)
Anyways... The fields in every line are:
NAME<Mandatory> PREPENDITION<maybe> HAVENT_GOT_A_CLUE<maybe>
I wanted to help, and I`ve tried different ways to parse
this, and I only have a little sample data, but I came up
with this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $Prep_Re=join '|',('VAN DER','VAN DE','DEN','DE','VAN'); print "Name\t\tPrependition\t\tWhatever\n"; while (<DATA>) { chomp; s/\s{2,}/ /g; my ($Name,$Prep,$Unknown); ($Name,$Prep,$Unknown)=($`,$1,$') if (/ ($Prep_Re)/); ($Name,$Unknown)=($`,$1) if ((!$Name)&&(/ (\S*?$)/)); $Prep||=''; print "$Name\t\t$Prep\t\t$Unknown\n"; }; __DATA__ WINTER DE <A240> ZANDEN VAN DER ŤAť JENSEN 230 WOODHEAD <D> BRINK 130,- HEYDIER DEN <240> SMITSER (4X115PJ) LINDEN VAN DER MOTEL GOLDEN LEEUW <A225>
It works for my sample data, but I can already think of
cases where it won`t work... and... I have a gut-feeling
this can be done better (I`m not a regex-wiz) ...
Any pointers ?
GreetZ!,
- ChOas
print "profeth still\n" if /bird|devil/;
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Replies are listed 'Best First'. | |
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Re: Can this be parsed ?
by dws (Chancellor) on Jul 11, 2002 at 06:23 UTC | |
by ChOas (Curate) on Jul 11, 2002 at 07:31 UTC | |
Re: Can this be parsed ?
by ChOas (Curate) on Jul 11, 2002 at 06:55 UTC | |
by hossman (Prior) on Jul 11, 2002 at 08:11 UTC | |
Re: Can this be parsed ?
by cLive ;-) (Prior) on Jul 11, 2002 at 08:05 UTC | |
Re: Can this be parsed ?
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jul 11, 2002 at 09:47 UTC | |
Re: Can this be parsed ?
by Popcorn Dave (Abbot) on Jul 11, 2002 at 18:45 UTC | |
Re: Can this be parsed ?
by hossman (Prior) on Jul 11, 2002 at 06:24 UTC | |
by Cody Pendant (Prior) on Jul 11, 2002 at 06:43 UTC | |
by hossman (Prior) on Jul 11, 2002 at 08:02 UTC |
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