My fellow monks,
I have an interesting text processing task before (Not homework). What I need to do is open a file, skip the first 4 lines, then on all the remaining lines, duplicate each character except for the '^' and '#' characters, and rewrite the file.

On an input file of:

andromeda:davidj perl_test > cat f.txt
^this^
^is^
^a^
^test^
^david#jenkins^
^ cinea#jenkins ^
[download]

the output should be:

andromeda:davidj perl_test > cat out.txt
^this^
^is^
^a^
^test^
^ddaavviidd#jjeennkkiinnss^
^  cciinneeaa#jjeennkkiinnss  ^
[download]

I currently have the following code which works perfectly well:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

open(FILE, "<f.txt");
open(OUT, ">out.txt");
while(<FILE>) {
    my $str = "";
    chomp $_;
    if( 1 .. 4 ) {
        print OUT "$_\n";
        next;
    }
    while( $_ =~ m/(.)/g ) {
        if( $1 =~ m/(\^|\#)/ ) {
            $str .= "$1";
        } else {
            $str .= "$1$1";
        }
    }
    print "$str\n";
    print OUT "$str\n";
}
close(FILE);
close(OUT);
[download]

I didn't like the idea of creating a temporary string, so I have the following which modifies the text as it is processing it, and also works perfectly well:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

open(FILE, "<f.txt");
open(OUT, ">out.txt");
while(<FILE>) {
    chomp $_;
    if( 1 .. 4 ) {
        print OUT "$_\n";
        next;
    }

    for( my $i = 0; $i < length($_); $i++ ) {
        if( substr($_, $i, 1) =~ m/(\^|\#)/ ) {
            substr($_, $i, 1) = "$1";
        } elsif( substr($_, $i, 1) =~ m/(.)/ ) {
            substr($_, $i, 1) = "$1$1";
            $i++;
        }
    }
    print OUT "$_\n";
}
close(FILE);
close(OUT);
[download]

I don't like this solution because it breaks the cardinal rule of not modifying a for loop counter inside the loop. (Not that I'm any kind of coding purist, mind you :)

Benchmarking the solutions indicates that (not surprisingly) using a temporary string is quicker. The following results are on 250000 iterations of a file with 1750 lines, each line no more than 50 characters.

andromeda:davidj perl_test > perl test.pl
              Rate 2nd string   In place
2nd string 28969/s         --       -17%
In place   35112/s        21%         --
[download]

Now to my curiosity: Both of these solutions work and I am satisfied with using either of them. What I'd like to have, purely for the educational value, is a more "Perlish" way of doing this, and/or a more efficient way.

as always thank you for your assistance,

davidj

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