The Perl Short Questions Megathread: executable line noise

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Perl Short Questions Megathread: executable line noise

FreshFeesh: Jun 3, 2007; Drum Solo

I'm trying to iterate through an alphabetized list and edit/remove entries based on particular criteria, but as I scale up the code I want to make sure I'm being as clean as possible, since I haven't touched this stuff in a while.

code:

@array = ('cat', 'dog 1', 'dog 2', 'dog 3', 'duck');

Desired output:    cat | dog 1, 2, 3 | duck

Here's my code which does the job, but looks fairly inefficient to me:

code:

for my $i (0 .. $#array) {
	$array[$i-1] =~ m/(\w+)\b/;
	if ($array[$i] =~ m/^$1\b/) {
		$array[$i] =~ m/(\d+)$/;
		$output[-1] .= ", $1";
	}
	else { push(@output, $array[$i]); }
}

It outputs correctly, but I'd be grateful for any suggestions you guys have for ways I can clean it up, so when I scale it out to a more complicated list it's easier to manage.

FreshFeesh fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Jul 24, 2016

# ¿ Jul 24, 2016 11:57

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# ¿ May 2, 2024 13:12

FreshFeesh: Jun 3, 2007; Drum Solo

I considered that, but unfortunately my data is more akin to

code:

Favorite Food: Spaghetti
Favorite Food: Tofu Lasagna
Green Beans 1
Green Beans 2
I like monkeys
Favorite Drink: Coors

Which makes splitting on whitespace problematic. I ended up with two different tests, one for lines ending on a number and other specific entries which would contain a colon as a delimiter:

code:

for my $i (0 .. $#newout) {
	if ($newout[$i] =~ m/\d+$/) {
		$newout[$i-1] =~ m/^([a-zA-Z\s]+)\d*/;
		if ($newout[$i] =~ m/^$1/) {
			$newout[$i] =~ m/(\d+)$/;
			$output[-1] .= ", $1";
		} else { 
			push(@output, $newout[$i]); 
		}
	}
	elsif ($newout[$i] =~ m/^Favorite Drink:/ or $newout[$i] =~ m/^Favorite Food:/ or $newout[$i] =~ m/^Something Else:/ or $newout[$i] =~ m/^Dance Party:/) {
		$newout[$i-1] =~ m/^([\w\s]+)/;
		if ($newout[$i] =~ m/^$1/) {
			$newout[$i] =~ m/: ([\w\s]+)$/;
			$output[-1] .= ", $1";
		} else { 
			push(@output, $newout[$i]); 
		}
	}
	else { 
		push(@output, $newout[$i]); 
	}
}

^{(I know my variable names are crap)}

FreshFeesh fucked around with this message at 13:09 on Jul 24, 2016

# ¿ Jul 24, 2016 13:04

FreshFeesh: Jun 3, 2007; Drum Solo

Thank you for the suggestions, they're certainly helping and things look a lot better.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2016 13:38

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