Is this concise enough? (code)

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

Yes, I am using perl where I could just be using the shell. In this case, I am using perl because it is a little less processor intense (fewer processes forked), and a lot clearer from a readability point of view.

The application is a wrapper around a tape stacker. I want to read in six tapes from a stacker, in sequence, using the command `mtx`. I'm reading its output, here:

slot_1  Full
slot_2  Full
slot_3  Empty
slot_4  Full
slot_5  Full
slot_6  Full
Drive: tape 3 loaded
[download]

I can then figure out which tape is in the drive and which ones need to be done. Anyhow, the code that I have created to parse that information is here:

# status in this case is the output of mtx, above...
my @fields = split m[\n|\s+], $status, 13;
my $loaded = pop @fields;
my %drives = @fields;
[download]

This is pretty cool, but I dont get a feeling of satisfaction from it. What would be a more concise yet still clear way to do this?

thanks
brother dep

--
Laziness, Impatience, Hubris, and Generosity.

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Re: Is this concise enough? (code) by particle (Vicar) on Jun 24, 2001 at 04:31 UTC
well this looked fun so i gave it a shot: `# using your output in var $status my (%drives, $loaded); # remove last line from $status and assign to $loaded # of course, this assumes nice, predictable output, since # it's simply looking for the word Drive: $status =~ s/\n(Drive:.+)$// && ($loaded = $1); # create your hash with the remainder of $status %drives = split( m[\n\|\s+], $status, 12 );` [download] i think your way is clearer, but it was an interesting diversion. at least now if i see some better examples, i'll have a good idea of what they're doing. i tried, but i couldn't find any functions with side effects that could be put to good use here. ~Particle	[reply] [d/l]
(tye)Re: Is this concise enough? (code) by tye (Sage) on Jun 24, 2001 at 10:20 UTC
`my( $loaded, %drives )= ( split m[\s+], $status, 13 )[12,0..11];` [download] - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Is this concise enough? (code) by chipmunk (Parson) on Jun 24, 2001 at 18:08 UTC
The regular expression you've used in the split is a bit odd. \s+ matches \n, so the regex is mostly redundant. The one difference can be seen with these two snippets: `my @fields = split ' ', "abc\n def"; my @fields = split /\n\|\s+/, "abc\n def";` [download] The first splits on "\n ", producing ('abc', 'def'), while the second splits on "\n" and " ", producing ('abc', '', 'def'). In other words, split /\n\|\s+/ will give you null strings where there's a newline followed by whitespace (including blank lines). One other point; your code depends on having exactly six slots. You might consider writing it to work with any number of slots.	[reply] [d/l]


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