Placing text onto multiple lines

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am attempting, to use perl to place text onto new lines. I have a tab delimited file which looks similar to this.

John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up <job>Manager Books
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up <job>Manager Books <job>Manager Acounts

What I am trying to do is, where a 2nd, 3rd or more <job> appears, I want to place it onto a new line, but with the text up to the date with the information. The final output would look something like this.

John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up
John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Books

Can anybody help?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open (INPUT, "jobs.txt");
open (OUTPUT, ">newjobs.txt");

while ( <INPUT> ) {
my $TheLine = $_;

    while ($TheLine=~ [^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*##cita
+tion##[^\n]*/i)
    {
    $TheLine=~ /([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)##cita
+tion##([^\n]*)/$1\t$2\n$1\t$3\n$1\t$4/i;
    }
    while ($TheLine=~ /[^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*##citation##[^\n]*/i)
    {
    $TheLine=~ s/([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)##citation##([^\n]*)/$1\t
+$2\n$1\t$3/i;
    }

print OUTPUT "$TheLine";

}
close INPUT;
close OUTPUT;
[download]

Comment on Placing text onto multiple lines Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Placing text onto multiple lines by vladb (Vicar) on May 11, 2003 at 22:31 UTC
This works for me: `use strict; while (<DATA>) { chomp(); my ($first, @rest) = split "<job>"; print "$first<job>$_\n" for @rest; } __DATA__ John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up <job>Manager Books John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up <job>Manager Books <job>M +anager Acounts` [download] And output: `John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Books John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Clean-up John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Books John Smith 25 May 2003 <job>Manager Acounts` [download] _____________________ "We've all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true." Robert Wilensky, University of California	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Placing text onto multiple lines by pzbagel (Chaplain) on May 11, 2003 at 22:36 UTC
I'm going to assume that every input line is comprised of a name and data and then 1 or more <job>s. `while(<INPUT>){ chomp; ($name,@jobs)=split /<job>/; for $job (@jobs) { print OUTPUT "$name <job>$job\n"; } }` [download] Good luck	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Placing text onto multiple lines by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on May 11, 2003 at 22:33 UTC
Anonymous Monk, This seems like what you want, but if not - say so and I will try something else: `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; open (INPUT,"jobs.txt") or die "Unable to open input : $!"; open (OUTPUT,"jobs.txt") or die "Unable to open output : $!"; select OUTPUT; $\ = "\n"; while (<INPUT>) { chomp; my @fields = split /\t/; unless (@fields > 2) { print join "\t" , @fields; } else { my $firstfield = shift @fields; while (my $nextfield = shift @fields) { print $firstfield, "\t", $nextfield; } } } close INPUT; close OUTPUT;` [download] Cheers - L~R Update: Both vladb++ and pzbagel++ have simpler solutions than this. The only thing I would point out is you said tab delimited.	[reply] [d/l]


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