Re: Huge simple problem

May I suggest that you learn to use the foreach loop in Perl, rather than the c-style for loop.

my @searchTexts = split (/and|or/i,$query);
foreach my $text (@searchtexts) {
   $text =~ s/^\s+//;
   $text =~ s/\s+$//;
   print "$text\n";
}
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and in a loop this simple I would just use $_

foreach (split /and|or/i,$query) {
  s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/;
  print "$_\n";
}
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or reduce it even further with a map and a join (depends on circumstance, if I'm the not only maintainer I'd probably use the above version)

print join("\n",map {/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/;$1} split(/and|or/i,$query)) . "\
+n";
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all the above code is untested.

update: also you could first clean the ends of $query (with s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/). Then if you change the slip condition to /\s*(?:and|or)\s*/ you can skip the map:

print join("n\",split(/\s*(?:and|or)\s*/,$query)) . "\n";
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of course at this point you can skip the whole split and use:

$query =~ s/\s*(?:and|or)\s*/\n/g;
print "$query\n";
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A final note, all these will fail horribly if your data has and/or imbedded in words. ie world. You probably want to split on /\s+(?:and|or)\s+/ or /\s*\b(?:and|or)\b\s*/

Phew, now I need a nap

-pete
"Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."

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Re^2: Huge simple problem by dsheroh (Monsignor) on Aug 06, 2009 at 00:04 UTC
May I suggest that you learn to use the foreach loop in Perl, rather than the c-style for loop. Do note that `foreach` is just an alternate spelling of `for`. `for my $text (@searchtexts) { ... }` is exactly equivalent to `foreach my $text (@searchtexts) { ... }`. Either way, though, I can't remember the last time I used a C-style `for` loop in Perl. `for ( [list] )` is so much nicer and avoids all those nasty off-by-one errors.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Huge simple problem by Anonymous Monk on Aug 06, 2009 at 01:00 UTC
I second this advice, and (missingthepoint posting anonymously), ++ to you both for helpful replies (when I remember what I changed my password to). Also, may I suggest you `use strict` and `use warnings`? (put those two lines at the top of your code). It will save you a lot of time - I speak from painful experience :\| One final word: it appears as though you're trying to get the number of elements in `@a` by writing `@a +1 -1`. That's contorted - you can just say `$i <= @a`, since `<=` puts its operands (that is, `$i` and `@a`) in scalar context, and for the array, produces the number of elements it contains. You can improve that even further, too. As it stands you have an off-by-one error - looping from `$i = 0` to `$i = @array<c> will put you one element beyond the end. If you need a C-style for loop, you can write: <c>for ($i = 0; $i < @a; $i++) { ...` and be done with it. :) But in your situation, you would be better served just doing what dsheroh++ said and using a plain `for`: `for my $element (@a) { <do something with element> ...` Don't hesitate to let me know if that was unclear. :)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Huge simple problem by Anonymous Monk on Aug 06, 2009 at 01:01 UTC
... and you already noticed (part of) that. Never mind, hopefully someone else benefits from that node.	[reply]
Re^3: Huge simple problem by dreadpiratepeter (Priest) on Aug 06, 2009 at 04:07 UTC
I always say foreach when doing (@a) type loops and for when doing c-style loops. helps make the code a little more self-documenting -pete "Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere."	[reply]
Re^2: Huge simple problem by Anonymous Monk on Aug 05, 2009 at 23:07 UTC
Thanks for the help!	[reply]


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