You print $line->[0] which is quite different from $line[0]. How this prints "371225..." is beyond me.

You also do lots of strange things to my eye, but that is to be expected ;-). For example to copy @arr into @line (for which you used a loop) "@arr= @line;" would have been enough. The same goes for "my @lines= ($line[0]..."

Also using lots of variables called $line, $lines, @line, @lines makes any program into an entry into the obfuscation contest. Differentiate your variables better

What you have been looking for might be this:

# starting with @arr having all the lines

my @ticker;
my @names=('ticket','dateadded','stime','etime','pri','SiteName','comm
+ents');

my $i=0;
foreach my $line (@arr) {
  my @items= split(/\|/, $line;
  print "ETime is $items[3]\n";
  $ticker[$i]{$names{$_}}= $items[$_] for scalar @names;
  $i++;
}

# now $ticker[3]{SiteName} is SiteName of the fourth line
[download]

Note @ticker and $i are only neccessary if you want to operate on the data after the loop. If you just want to print or store the stuff, do that in the foreach loop above. You can also just use the split line you have in your script to fill the variables with the data inside the loop instead of using @items if it suits you better

This is really close to where I was going. I can't seem to initialize {$names{$_}} due to the curly braces. Is this assigning everything into a hash table? If so, I'm receiving an error about either $names or $items that it isn't initialized, which is very similar to the errors my original code pulled. Is there maybe a different notation to assign everything into a hash while still initializing the variables?

Initializing a hash can be done with an array, each pair of values in the array form key and value of the hash. Often '=>' is used as an alias to ',' to make this obvious:

my %hash= (0, 'ticket', 1 => 'dateadded');
[download]

{$names{$_}} on the other hand is not a really useful expression in perl, %{$names{$_}} refers to a hash whose reference is stored as value in another hash (i.e %names). A multidimensional hash or HashOfHashes in perlspeak

If what you wanted was a Hash of Hashes, the syntax looks like this:

$names{$_}{key}= 'value';
#or to initialize with an array:
%{$names{$_}} = ('key1' => 'value1','key2' => 'value2');
[download]

if you want further information about HoH (Hash of Hashes), you might want to read perldsc and perllol

Hi,

One other simpler way to make it works is to use regex memory as follow.

my $line="371540|4/07/2011|08:03|11:03|2|Company Name (MAIN SITE)|DB P
+URGE|"

if ($line =~ /(\d+)\|([0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{1,2}\/[0-9]{4})\|([0-9]{1,2}\:
+[0-9]{2})\|([0-9]{1,2}\:[0-9]{2})\|(\d+)\|((?:\w+)\s\w+\s(?:\()?\w+\s
+\w+\))\|(\w+(?:\s)?\w+)/ ) 
    {
    $item1=$1;
    $item2=$2;
    ...
    $item7=$7
    }
[download]

Note that the regexp has to be adapted. The parentheses captures their content.
First parenthese will be memorised as $1, Second parenthese will be memorised as $2 etc...

Personally, I am a very big fan of using high-level tools such as HTML::Parser to do as much “heavy lifting” as possible.

My rationale is that:   any HTML document does have a known structure (even if it is not obliged to adhere to it strictly, in actual practice), and that, “anytime you are dealing with a complex document having any known structure, the best way to deal with such a thing is to use a parser.”

There are many, many good parsing engines in Perl.   One that I recently had the privilege of beating to a bloody pulp (wink... it proceeded to do everything I asked it to, and more!!) was Parse::RecDescent.   (I am still in awe of its author!)   But in this case, the source-language is “simply HTML,” and HTML-specific tools abound.

All parsing engines are, so to speak, “engines that are really, really good at character-twiddling and which know the lay of the land.”   You rely upon them to go about their business and to call your code at strategic points, and to return data structures to you at those times.

This is, IMHO, a much stronger strategy than “regex hell,” which often yields solutions that work fine in initial test-cases but then require constant twiddling and head-banging.   Let the CPAN-authors do as much banging on your behalf as possible.   It will not, of course, eliminate the considerable amount of work that still remains to be done, but it might well make that work vastly easier.

HTH ...

I've got to second the vote for HTML::Parser or similar parsing engines.

A long time ago, before RSS feeds, I wrote a program to parse various newspaper websites and did the regexes by hand. I had 24 different rules for 90+ papers. When I rewrote it, I got it down to 9 rules, mainly based on web page design, since I used a parsing engine.

You're going to save yourself a ton of work since if the data changes you're going to have to rewrite your regexes each time.

---

To disagree, one doesn't have to be disagreeable - Barry Goldwater

Thank you for such an informative response! I'll be sure to look into more about Parse::RecDescent, but for now that may be too daunting to pick up for a novice. Is there an example using HTML::Parser you could describe for using in this situation? I'm unfamiliar with basically any module outside of CGI. :(

you can try something like

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my @data = ("371540|4/07/2011|08:03|11:03|2|Company Name (MAIN SITE)|D
+B PURGE1|",
"371540|4/07/2011|08:03|11:03|2|Company Name (MAIN SITE)|DB PURGE1|",
"371540|4/07/2011|08:03|11:03|2|Company Name (MAIN SITE)|DB PURGE1|",
"371540|4/07/2011|08:03|11:03|2|Company Name (MAIN SITE)|DB PURGE1|",
"371540|4/07/2011|08:03|11:03|2|Company Name (MAIN SITE)|DB PURGE1|");
print Dumper(@data);

foreach my $field (@data){
    my ($ticket,$DateAdded,$STime,$ETime,$Pri,$SiteName,$Comments) = s
+plit(/\|/,$field);
    print"$ticket,$DateAdded,$STime,$ETime,$Pri,$SiteName,$Comments\n"
+;
}
[download]

Thank you! This is very close to where I was originally intending to head with the script. I cannot surmise how to access each element to have the variable assigned to it, though.

When I run this segment, I fail initializing $field within the split. I'm not sure how I got this error because everything is localized in the loop, right? Would I access these variables with $ticket[0], $ticket[1]? I could easily adapt the rest of the script if this is the case.

I've since somewhat resolved the issues I was having and resorted learning all about making an array of arrays while in a for loop. Thank you all for your magnificent help and resources! I couldn't have figured any of this out without you.