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perlfaq4

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NAME
DESCRIPTION
Data: Numbers
Data: Dates
Data: Strings
Data: Arrays
Data: Hashes (Associative Arrays)
Data: Misc
REVISION
AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT

NAME

perlfaq4 - Data Manipulation ($Revision: 10394 $)

DESCRIPTION

This section of the FAQ answers questions related to manipulating numbers, dates, strings, arrays, hashes, and miscellaneous data issues.

Data: Numbers

Why am I getting long decimals (eg, 19.9499999999999) instead of the numbers I should be getting (eg, 19.95)?

Internally, your computer represents floating-point numbers in binary. Digital (as in powers of two) computers cannot store all numbers exactly. Some real numbers lose precision in the process. This is a problem with how computers store numbers and affects all computer languages, not just Perl.

perlnumber shows the gory details of number representations and conversions.

To limit the number of decimal places in your numbers, you can use the printf or sprintf function. See the "Floating Point Arithmetic" for more details.

	printf "%.2f", 10/3;

	my $number = sprintf "%.2f", 10/3;

Why is int() broken?

Your int() is most probably working just fine. It's the numbers that aren't quite what you think.

First, see the answer to "Why am I getting long decimals (eg, 19.9499999999999) instead of the numbers I should be getting (eg, 19.95)?".

For example, this

	print int(0.6/0.2-2), "\n";

will in most computers print 0, not 1, because even such simple numbers as 0.6 and 0.2 cannot be presented exactly by floating-point numbers. What you think in the above as 'three' is really more like 2.9999999999999995559.

Why isn't my octal data interpreted correctly?

Perl only understands octal and hex numbers as such when they occur as literals in your program. Octal literals in perl must start with a leading 0 and hexadecimal literals must start with a leading 0x . If they are read in from somewhere and assigned, no automatic conversion takes place. You must explicitly use oct() or hex() if you want the values converted to decimal. oct() interprets hexadecimal (0x350 ), octal (0350 or even without the leading 0 , like 377 ) and binary (0b1010 ) numbers, while hex() only converts hexadecimal ones, with or without a leading 0x , such as 0x255 , 3A, ff , or deadbeef . The inverse mapping from decimal to octal can be done with either the <%o> or %O sprintf() formats.

This problem shows up most often when people try using chmod(), mkdir(), umask(), or sysopen(), which by widespread tradition typically take permissions in octal.

	chmod(644,  $file);   # WRONG
	chmod(0644, $file);   # right

Note the mistake in the first line was specifying the decimal literal 644 , rather than the intended octal literal 0644 . The problem can be seen with:

	printf("%#o",644);   # prints 01204

Surely you had not intended chmod(01204, $file); - did you? If you want to use numeric literals as arguments to chmod() et al. then please try to express them as octal constants, that is with a leading zero and with the following digits restricted to the set 0..7 .

Does Perl have a round() function? What about ceil() and floor()? Trig functions?

Remember that int() merely truncates toward 0. For rounding to a certain number of digits, sprintf() or printf() is usually the easiest route.

	printf("%.3f", 3.1415926535);   # prints 3.142

The POSIX module (part of the standard Perl distribution) implements ceil() , floor() , and a number of other mathematical and trigonometric functions.

	use POSIX;
	$ceil   = ceil(3.5);   # 4
	$floor  = floor(3.5);  # 3

In 5.000 to 5.003 perls, trigonometry was done in the Math::Complex module. With 5.004, the Math::Trig module (part of the standard Perl distribution) implements the trigonometric functions. Internally it uses the Math::Complex module and some functions can break out from the real axis into the complex plane, for example the inverse sine of 2.

Rounding in financial applications can have serious implications, and the rounding method used should be specified precisely. In these cases, it probably pays not to trust whichever system rounding is being used by Perl, but to instead implement the rounding function you need yourself.

To see why, notice how you'll still have an issue on half-way-point alternation:

	for ($i = 0; $i < 1.01; $i += 0.05) { printf "%.1f ",$i}

	0.0 0.1 0.1 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.3 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.7
	0.8 0.8 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.0

Don't blame Perl. It's the same as in C. IEEE says we have to do this. Perl numbers whose absolute values are integers under 2**31 (on 32 bit machines) will work pretty much like mathematical integers. Other numbers are not guaranteed.

How do I convert between numeric representations/bases/radixes?

As always with Perl there is more than one way to do it. Below are a few examples of approaches to making common conversions between number representations. This is intended to be representational rather than exhaustive.

Some of the examples later in perlfaq4 use the Bit::Vector module from CPAN. The reason you might choose Bit::Vector over the perl built in functions is that it works with numbers of ANY size, that it is optimized for speed on some operations, and for at least some programmers the notation might be familiar.

How do I convert hexadecimal into decimal

Using perl's built in conversion of 0x notation:

	$dec = 0xDEADBEEF;

Using the hex function:

	$dec = hex("DEADBEEF");

Using pack:

	$dec = unpack("N", pack("H8", substr("0" x 8 . "DEADBEEF", -8)));

Using the CPAN module Bit::Vector :

	use Bit::Vector;
	$vec = Bit::Vector->new_Hex(32, "DEADBEEF");
	$dec = $vec->to_Dec();

How do I convert from decimal to hexadecimal

Using sprintf:

	$hex = sprintf("%X", 3735928559); # upper case A-F
	$hex = sprintf("%x", 3735928559); # lower case a-f

Using unpack:

	$hex = unpack("H*", pack("N", 3735928559));

Using Bit::Vector :

	use Bit::Vector;
	$vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(32, -559038737);
	$hex = $vec->to_Hex();

And Bit::Vector supports odd bit counts:

	use Bit::Vector;
	$vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(33, 3735928559);
	$vec->Resize(32); # suppress leading 0 if unwanted
	$hex = $vec->to_Hex();

How do I convert from octal to decimal

Using Perl's built in conversion of numbers with leading zeros:

	$dec = 033653337357; # note the leading 0!

Using the oct function:

	$dec = oct("33653337357");

Using Bit::Vector :

	use Bit::Vector;
	$vec = Bit::Vector->new(32);
	$vec->Chunk_List_Store(3, split(//, reverse "33653337357"));
	$dec = $vec->to_Dec();

How do I convert from decimal to octal

Using sprintf:

	$oct = sprintf("%o", 3735928559);

Using Bit::Vector :

	use Bit::Vector;
	$vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(32, -559038737);
	$oct = reverse join('', $vec->Chunk_List_Read(3));

How do I convert from binary to decimal

Perl 5.6 lets you write binary numbers directly with the 0b notation:

	$number = 0b10110110;

Using oct:

	my $input = "10110110";
	$decimal = oct( "0b$input" );

Using pack and ord:

	$decimal = ord(pack('B8', '10110110'));

Using pack and unpack for larger strings:

	$int = unpack("N", pack("B32",
	substr("0" x 32 . "11110101011011011111011101111", -32)));
	$dec = sprintf("%d", $int);

	# substr() is used to left pad a 32 character string with zeros.

Using Bit::Vector :

	$vec = Bit::Vector->new_Bin(32, "11011110101011011011111011101111");
	$dec = $vec->to_Dec();

How do I convert from decimal to binary
Using sprintf (perl 5.6+):
```
	$bin = sprintf("%b", 3735928559);
```
Using unpack:
```
	$bin = unpack("B*", pack("N", 3735928559));
```
Using Bit::Vector :
```
	use Bit::Vector;
	$vec = Bit::Vector->new_Dec(32, -559038737);
	$bin = $vec->to_Bin();
```
The remaining transformations (e.g. hex -> oct, bin -> hex, etc.) are left as an exercise to the inclined reader.

Why doesn't & work the way I want it to?

The behavior of binary arithmetic operators depends on whether they're used on numbers or strings. The operators treat a string as a series of bits and work with that (the string "3" is the bit pattern 00110011 ). The operators work with the binary form of a number (the number 3 is treated as the bit pattern 00000011 ).

So, saying 11 & 3 performs the "and" operation on numbers (yielding 3 ). Saying "11" & "3" performs the "and" operation on strings (yielding "1" ).

Most problems with & and | arise because the programmer thinks they have a number but really it's a string. The rest arise because the programmer says:

	if ("\020\020" & "\101\101") {
		# ...
		}

but a string consisting of two null bytes (the result of "\020\020" & "\101\101" ) is not a false value in Perl. You need:

	if ( ("\020\020" & "\101\101") !~ /[^\000]/) {
		# ...
		}

How do I multiply matrices?

Use the Math::Matrix or Math::MatrixReal modules (available from CPAN) or the PDL extension (also available from CPAN).

How do I perform an operation on a series of integers?

To call a function on each element in an array, and collect the results, use:

	@results = map { my_func($_) } @array;

For example:

	@triple = map { 3 * $_ } @single;

To call a function on each element of an array, but ignore the results:

	foreach $iterator (@array) {
		some_func($iterator);
		}

To call a function on each integer in a (small) range, you can use:

	@results = map { some_func($_) } (5 .. 25);

but you should be aware that the .. operator creates an array of all integers in the range. This can take a lot of memory for large ranges. Instead use:

	@results = ();
	for ($i=5; $i < 500_005; $i++) {
		push(@results, some_func($i));
		}

This situation has been fixed in Perl5.005. Use of .. in a for loop will iterate over the range, without creating the entire range.

	for my $i (5 .. 500_005) {
		push(@results, some_func($i));
		}

will not create a list of 500,000 integers.

How can I output Roman numerals?

Get the http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Roman module.

Why aren't my random numbers random?

If you're using a version of Perl before 5.004, you must call srand once at the start of your program to seed the random number generator.

	 BEGIN { srand() if $] < 5.004 }

5.004 and later automatically call srand at the beginning. Don't call srand more than once--you make your numbers less random, rather than more.

Computers are good at being predictable and bad at being random (despite appearances caused by bugs in your programs :-). see the random article in the "Far More Than You Ever Wanted To Know" collection in http://www.cpan.org/misc/olddoc/FMTEYEWTK.tgz , courtesy of Tom Phoenix, talks more about this. John von Neumann said, "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."

If you want numbers that are more random than rand with srand provides, you should also check out the Math::TrulyRandom module from CPAN. It uses the imperfections in your system's timer to generate random numbers, but this takes quite a while. If you want a better pseudorandom generator than comes with your operating system, look at "Numerical Recipes in C" at http://www.nr.com/ .

How do I get a random number between X and Y?

To get a random number between two values, you can use the rand() builtin to get a random number between 0 and 1. From there, you shift that into the range that you want.

rand($x) returns a number such that 0 <= rand($x) < $x . Thus what you want to have perl figure out is a random number in the range from 0 to the difference between your X and Y.

That is, to get a number between 10 and 15, inclusive, you want a random number between 0 and 5 that you can then add to 10.

	my $number = 10 + int rand( 15-10+1 );

Hence you derive the following simple function to abstract that. It selects a random integer between the two given integers (inclusive), For example: random_int_between(50,120) .

	sub random_int_between {
		my($min, $max) = @_;
		# Assumes that the two arguments are integers themselves!
		return $min if $min == $max;
		($min, $max) = ($max, $min)  if  $min > $max;
		return $min + int rand(1 + $max - $min);
		}

Data: Dates

How do I find the day or week of the year?

The localtime function returns the day of the year. Without an argument localtime uses the current time.

	$day_of_year = (localtime)[7];

The POSIX module can also format a date as the day of the year or week of the year.

	use POSIX qw/strftime/;
	my $day_of_year  = strftime "%j", localtime;
	my $week_of_year = strftime "%W", localtime;

To get the day of year for any date, use POSIX 's mktime to get a time in epoch seconds for the argument to localtime.

	use POSIX qw/mktime strftime/;
	my $week_of_year = strftime "%W",
		localtime( mktime( 0, 0, 0, 18, 11, 87 ) );

The Date::Calc module provides two functions to calculate these.

	use Date::Calc;
	my $day_of_year  = Day_of_Year(  1987, 12, 18 );
	my $week_of_year = Week_of_Year( 1987, 12, 18 );

How do I find the current century or millennium?

Use the following simple functions:

	sub get_century    {
		return int((((localtime(shift || time))[5] + 1999))/100);
		}

	sub get_millennium {
		return 1+int((((localtime(shift || time))[5] + 1899))/1000);
		}

On some systems, the POSIX module's strftime() function has been extended in a non-standard way to use a %C format, which they sometimes claim is the "century". It isn't, because on most such systems, this is only the first two digits of the four-digit year, and thus cannot be used to reliably determine the current century or millennium.

How can I compare two dates and find the difference?

(contributed by brian d foy)

You could just store all your dates as a number and then subtract. Life isn't always that simple though. If you want to work with formatted dates, the Date::Manip , Date::Calc , or DateTime modules can help you.

How can I take a string and turn it into epoch seconds?

If it's a regular enough string that it always has the same format, you can split it up and pass the parts to timelocal in the standard Time::Local module. Otherwise, you should look into the Date::Calc and Date::Manip modules from CPAN.

How can I find the Julian Day?

(contributed by brian d foy and Dave Cross)

You can use the Time::JulianDay module available on CPAN. Ensure that you really want to find a Julian day, though, as many people have different ideas about Julian days. See http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/jdn.htm for instance.

You can also try the DateTime module, which can convert a date/time to a Julian Day.

	$ perl -MDateTime -le'print DateTime->today->jd'
	2453401.5

Or the modified Julian Day

	$ perl -MDateTime -le'print DateTime->today->mjd'
	53401

Or even the day of the year (which is what some people think of as a Julian day)

	$ perl -MDateTime -le'print DateTime->today->doy'
	31

How do I find yesterday's date?

(contributed by brian d foy)

Use one of the Date modules. The DateTime module makes it simple, and give you the same time of day, only the day before.

	use DateTime;

	my $yesterday = DateTime->now->subtract( days => 1 );

	print "Yesterday was $yesterday\n";

You can also use the Date::Calc module using its Today_and_Now function.

	use Date::Calc qw( Today_and_Now Add_Delta_DHMS );

	my @date_time = Add_Delta_DHMS( Today_and_Now(), -1, 0, 0, 0 );

	print "@date_time\n";

Most people try to use the time rather than the calendar to figure out dates, but that assumes that days are twenty-four hours each. For most people, there are two days a year when they aren't: the switch to and from summer time throws this off. Let the modules do the work.

Does Perl have a Year 2000 problem? Is Perl Y2K compliant?

Short answer: No, Perl does not have a Year 2000 problem. Yes, Perl is Y2K compliant (whatever that means). The programmers you've hired to use it, however, probably are not.

Long answer: The question belies a true understanding of the issue. Perl is just as Y2K compliant as your pencil--no more, and no less. Can you use your pencil to write a non-Y2K-compliant memo? Of course you can. Is that the pencil's fault? Of course it isn't.

The date and time functions supplied with Perl (gmtime and localtime) supply adequate information to determine the year well beyond 2000 (2038 is when trouble strikes for 32-bit machines). The year returned by these functions when used in a list context is the year minus 1900. For years between 1910 and 1999 this happens to be a 2-digit decimal number. To avoid the year 2000 problem simply do not treat the year as a 2-digit number. It isn't.

When gmtime() and localtime() are used in scalar context they return a timestamp string that contains a fully-expanded year. For example, $timestamp = gmtime(1005613200) sets $timestamp to "Tue Nov 13 01:00:00 2001". There's no year 2000 problem here.

That doesn't mean that Perl can't be used to create non-Y2K compliant programs. It can. But so can your pencil. It's the fault of the user, not the language. At the risk of inflaming the NRA: "Perl doesn't break Y2K, people do." See http://www.perl.org/about/y2k.html for a longer exposition.

Data: Strings

How do I validate input?

(contributed by brian d foy)

There are many ways to ensure that values are what you expect or want to accept. Besides the specific examples that we cover in the perlfaq, you can also look at the modules with "Assert" and "Validate" in their names, along with other modules such as Regexp::Common .

Some modules have validation for particular types of input, such as Business::ISBN , Business::CreditCard , Email::Valid , and Data::Validate::IP .

How do I unescape a string?

It depends just what you mean by "escape". URL escapes are dealt with in perlfaq9. Shell escapes with the backslash (\ ) character are removed with

	s/\\(.)/$1/g;

This won't expand "\n" or "\t" or any other special escapes.

How do I remove consecutive pairs of characters?

(contributed by brian d foy)

You can use the substitution operator to find pairs of characters (or runs of characters) and replace them with a single instance. In this substitution, we find a character in (.). The memory parentheses store the matched character in the back-reference \1 and we use that to require that the same thing immediately follow it. We replace that part of the string with the character in $1 .

	s/(.)\1/$1/g;

We can also use the transliteration operator, tr///. In this example, the search list side of our tr/// contains nothing, but the c option complements that so it contains everything. The replacement list also contains nothing, so the transliteration is almost a no-op since it won't do any replacements (or more exactly, replace the character with itself). However, the s option squashes duplicated and consecutive characters in the string so a character does not show up next to itself

	my $str = 'Haarlem';   # in the Netherlands
	$str =~ tr///cs;       # Now Harlem, like in New York

How do I expand function calls in a string?

(contributed by brian d foy)

This is documented in perlref, and although it's not the easiest thing to read, it does work. In each of these examples, we call the function inside the braces used to dereference a reference. If we have more than one return value, we can construct and dereference an anonymous array. In this case, we call the function in list context.

	print "The time values are @{ [localtime] }.\n";

If we want to call the function in scalar context, we have to do a bit more work. We can really have any code we like inside the braces, so we simply have to end with the scalar reference, although how you do that is up to you, and you can use code inside the braces. Note that the use of parens creates a list context, so we need scalar to force the scalar context on the function:

	print "The time is ${\(scalar localtime)}.\n"

	print "The time is ${ my $x = localtime; \$x }.\n";

If your function already returns a reference, you don't need to create the reference yourself.

	sub timestamp { my $t = localtime; \$t }

	print "The time is ${ timestamp() }.\n";

The Interpolation module can also do a lot of magic for you. You can specify a variable name, in this case E , to set up a tied hash that does the interpolation for you. It has several other methods to do this as well.

	use Interpolation E => 'eval';
	print "The time values are $E{localtime()}.\n";

In most cases, it is probably easier to simply use string concatenation, which also forces scalar context.

	print "The time is " . localtime() . ".\n";

How do I find matching/nesting anything?

This isn't something that can be done in one regular expression, no matter how complicated. To find something between two single characters, a pattern like /x([^x]*)x/ will get the intervening bits in $1. For multiple ones, then something more like /alpha(.*?)omega/ would be needed. But none of these deals with nested patterns. For balanced expressions using (, {, [ or < as delimiters, use the CPAN module Regexp::Common, or see "(??{ code })" in perlre. For other cases, you'll have to write a parser.

If you are serious about writing a parser, there are a number of modules or oddities that will make your life a lot easier. There are the CPAN modules Parse::RecDescent , Parse::Yapp , and Text::Balanced ; and the byacc program. Starting from perl 5.8 the Text::Balanced is part of the standard distribution.

One simple destructive, inside-out approach that you might try is to pull out the smallest nesting parts one at a time:

	while (s/BEGIN((?:(?!BEGIN)(?!END).)*)END//gs) {
		# do something with $1
		}

A more complicated and sneaky approach is to make Perl's regular expression engine do it for you. This is courtesy Dean Inada, and rather has the nature of an Obfuscated Perl Contest entry, but it really does work:

	# $_ contains the string to parse
	# BEGIN and END are the opening and closing markers for the
	# nested text.

	@( = ('(','');
	@) = (')','');
	($re=$_)=~s/((BEGIN)|(END)|.)/$)[!$3]\Q$1\E$([!$2]/gs;
	@$ = (eval{/$re/},$@!~/unmatched/i);
	print join("\n",@$[0..$#$]) if( $$[-1] );

How do I reverse a string?

Use reverse() in scalar context, as documented in reverse.

	$reversed = reverse $string;

How do I expand tabs in a string?

You can do it yourself:

	1 while $string =~ s/\t+/' ' x (length($&) * 8 - length($`) % 8)/e;

Or you can just use the Text::Tabs module (part of the standard Perl distribution).

	use Text::Tabs;
	@expanded_lines = expand(@lines_with_tabs);

How do I reformat a paragraph?

Use Text::Wrap (part of the standard Perl distribution):

	use Text::Wrap;
	print wrap("\t", '  ', @paragraphs);

The paragraphs you give to Text::Wrap should not contain embedded newlines. Text::Wrap doesn't justify the lines (flush-right).

Or use the CPAN module Text::Autoformat . Formatting files can be easily done by making a shell alias, like so:

	alias fmt="perl -i -MText::Autoformat -n0777 \
				-e 'print autoformat $_, {all=>1}' $*"

See the documentation for Text::Autoformat to appreciate its many capabilities.

How can I access or change N characters of a string?

You can access the first characters of a string with substr(). To get the first character, for example, start at position 0 and grab the string of length 1.

	$string = "Just another Perl Hacker";
	$first_char = substr( $string, 0, 1 );  #  'J'

To change part of a string, you can use the optional fourth argument which is the replacement string.

	substr( $string, 13, 4, "Perl 5.8.0" );

You can also use substr() as an lvalue.

	substr( $string, 13, 4 ) =  "Perl 5.8.0";

How do I change the Nth occurrence of something?

You have to keep track of N yourself. For example, let's say you want to change the fifth occurrence of "whoever" or "whomever" into "whosoever" or "whomsoever" , case insensitively. These all assume that $_ contains the string to be altered.

	$count = 0;
	s{((whom?)ever)}{
		++$count == 5       # is it the 5th?
	    	    ? "${2}soever"  # yes, swap
	    	    : $1            # renege and leave it there
				}ige;

In the more general case, you can use the /g modifier in a while loop, keeping count of matches.

	$WANT = 3;
	$count = 0;
	$_ = "One fish two fish red fish blue fish";
	while (/(\w+)\s+fish\b/gi) {
		if (++$count == $WANT) {
			print "The third fish is a $1 one.\n";
			}
		}

That prints out: "The third fish is a red one." You can also use a repetition count and repeated pattern like this:

	/(?:\w+\s+fish\s+){2}(\w+)\s+fish/i;

How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a string?

There are a number of ways, with varying efficiency. If you want a count of a certain single character (X) within a string, you can use the tr/// function like so:

	$string = "ThisXlineXhasXsomeXx'sXinXit";
	$count = ($string =~ tr/X//);
	print "There are $count X characters in the string";

This is fine if you are just looking for a single character. However, if you are trying to count multiple character substrings within a larger string, tr/// won't work. What you can do is wrap a while() loop around a global pattern match. For example, let's count negative integers:

	$string = "-9 55 48 -2 23 -76 4 14 -44";
	while ($string =~ /-\d+/g) { $count++ }
	print "There are $count negative numbers in the string";

Another version uses a global match in list context, then assigns the result to a scalar, producing a count of the number of matches.

	$count = () = $string =~ /-\d+/g;

How do I capitalize all the words on one line?

To make the first letter of each word upper case:

	$line =~ s/\b(\w)/\U$1/g;

This has the strange effect of turning "don't do it " into "Don'T Do It ". Sometimes you might want this. Other times you might need a more thorough solution (Suggested by brian d foy):

	$string =~ s/ (
				 				 (^\w)    #at the beginning of the line
				   				   |      # or
				 				 (\s\w)   #preceded by whitespace
				   				   )
								/\U$1/xg;

	$string =~ s/([\w']+)/\u\L$1/g;

To make the whole line upper case:

	$line = uc($line);

To force each word to be lower case, with the first letter upper case:

	$line =~ s/(\w+)/\u\L$1/g;

You can (and probably should) enable locale awareness of those characters by placing a use locale pragma in your program. See perllocale for endless details on locales.

This is sometimes referred to as putting something into "title case", but that's not quite accurate. Consider the proper capitalization of the movie Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, for example.

Damian Conway's Text::Autoformat module provides some smart case transformations:

	use Text::Autoformat;
	my $x = "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop ".
	  "Worrying and Love the Bomb";

	print $x, "\n";
	for my $style (qw( sentence title highlight )) {
		print autoformat($x, { case => $style }), "\n";
		}

How can I split a [character] delimited string except when inside [character]?

Several modules can handle this sort of parsing--Text::Balanced , Text::CSV , Text::CSV_XS , and Text::ParseWords , among others.

Take the example case of trying to split a string that is comma-separated into its different fields. You can't use split(/,/) because you shouldn't split if the comma is inside quotes. For example, take a data line like this:

	SAR001,"","Cimetrix, Inc","Bob Smith","CAM",N,8,1,0,7,"Error, Core Dumped"

Due to the restriction of the quotes, this is a fairly complex problem. Thankfully, we have Jeffrey Friedl, author of Mastering Regular Expressions, to handle these for us. He suggests (assuming your string is contained in $text ):

	 @new = ();
	 push(@new, $+) while $text =~ m{
		 		 "([^\"\\]*(?:\\.[^\"\\]*)*)",?  # groups the phrase inside the quotes
				| ([^,]+),?
				| ,
				}gx;
	 push(@new, undef) if substr($text,-1,1) eq ',';

If you want to represent quotation marks inside a quotation-mark-delimited field, escape them with backslashes (eg, "like \"this\"" .

Alternatively, the Text::ParseWords module (part of the standard Perl distribution) lets you say:

	use Text::ParseWords;
	@new = quotewords(",", 0, $text);

How do I strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string?

(contributed by brian d foy)

A substitution can do this for you. For a single line, you want to replace all the leading or trailing whitespace with nothing. You can do that with a pair of substitutions.

	s/^\s+//;
	s/\s+$//;

You can also write that as a single substitution, although it turns out the combined statement is slower than the separate ones. That might not matter to you, though.

	s/^\s+|\s+$//g;

In this regular expression, the alternation matches either at the beginning or the end of the string since the anchors have a lower precedence than the alternation. With the /g flag, the substitution makes all possible matches, so it gets both. Remember, the trailing newline matches the \s+, and the $ anchor can match to the physical end of the string, so the newline disappears too. Just add the newline to the output, which has the added benefit of preserving "blank" (consisting entirely of whitespace) lines which the ^\s+ would remove all by itself.

	while( <> )
		{
		s/^\s+|\s+$//g;
		print "$_\n";
		}

For a multi-line string, you can apply the regular expression to each logical line in the string by adding the /m flag (for "multi-line"). With the /m flag, the $ matches before an embedded newline, so it doesn't remove it. It still removes the newline at the end of the string.

	$string =~ s/^\s+|\s+$//gm;

Remember that lines consisting entirely of whitespace will disappear, since the first part of the alternation can match the entire string and replace it with nothing. If need to keep embedded blank lines, you have to do a little more work. Instead of matching any whitespace (since that includes a newline), just match the other whitespace.

	$string =~ s/^[\t\f ]+|[\t\f ]+$//mg;

How do I pad a string with blanks or pad a number with zeroes?

In the following examples, $pad_len is the length to which you wish to pad the string, $text or $num contains the string to be padded, and $pad_char contains the padding character. You can use a single character string constant instead of the $pad_char variable if you know what it is in advance. And in the same way you can use an integer in place of $pad_len if you know the pad length in advance.

The simplest method uses the sprintf function. It can pad on the left or right with blanks and on the left with zeroes and it will not truncate the result. The pack function can only pad strings on the right with blanks and it will truncate the result to a maximum length of $pad_len .

	# Left padding a string with blanks (no truncation):
	$padded = sprintf("%${pad_len}s", $text);
	$padded = sprintf("%*s", $pad_len, $text);  # same thing

	# Right padding a string with blanks (no truncation):
	$padded = sprintf("%-${pad_len}s", $text);
	$padded = sprintf("%-*s", $pad_len, $text); # same thing

	# Left padding a number with 0 (no truncation):
	$padded = sprintf("%0${pad_len}d", $num);
	$padded = sprintf("%0*d", $pad_len, $num); # same thing

	# Right padding a string with blanks using pack (will truncate):
	$padded = pack("A$pad_len",$text);

If you need to pad with a character other than blank or zero you can use one of the following methods. They all generate a pad string with the x operator and combine that with $text . These methods do not truncate $text .

Left and right padding with any character, creating a new string:

	$padded = $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) ) . $text;
	$padded = $text . $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) );

Left and right padding with any character, modifying $text directly:

	substr( $text, 0, 0 ) = $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) );
	$text .= $pad_char x ( $pad_len - length( $text ) );

How do I extract selected columns from a string?

(contributed by brian d foy)

If you know where the columns that contain the data, you can use substr to extract a single column.

	my $column = substr( $line, $start_column, $length );

You can use split if the columns are separated by whitespace or some other delimiter, as long as whitespace or the delimiter cannot appear as part of the data.

	my $line    = ' fred barney   betty   ';
	my @columns = split /\s+/, $line;
		# ( '', 'fred', 'barney', 'betty' );

	my $line    = 'fred||barney||betty';
	my @columns = split /\|/, $line;
		# ( 'fred', '', 'barney', '', 'betty' );

If you want to work with comma-separated values, don't do this since that format is a bit more complicated. Use one of the modules that handle that fornat, such as Text::CSV , Text::CSV_XS , or Text::CSV_PP .

If you want to break apart an entire line of fixed columns, you can use unpack with the A (ASCII) format. by using a number after the format specifier, you can denote the column width. See the pack and unpack entries in perlfunc for more details.

	my @fields = unpack( $line, "A8 A8 A8 A16 A4" );

Note that spaces in the format argument to unpack do not denote literal spaces. If you have space separated data, you may want split instead.

How do I find the soundex value of a string?

(contributed by brian d foy)

You can use the Text::Soundex module. If you want to do fuzzy or close matching, you might also try the String::Approx , and Text::Metaphone , and Text::DoubleMetaphone modules.

How can I expand variables in text strings?

(contributed by brian d foy)

If you can avoid it, don't, or if you can use a templating system, such as Text::Template or Template Toolkit, do that instead. You might even be able to get the job done with sprintf or printf:

	my $string = sprintf 'Say hello to %s and %s', $foo, $bar;

However, for the one-off simple case where I don't want to pull out a full templating system, I'll use a string that has two Perl scalar variables in it. In this example, I want to expand $foo and $bar to their variable's values:

	my $foo = 'Fred';
	my $bar = 'Barney';
	$string = 'Say hello to $foo and $bar';

One way I can do this involves the substitution operator and a double /e flag. The first /e evaluates $1 on the replacement side and turns it into $foo . The second /e starts with $foo and replaces it with its value. $foo , then, turns into 'Fred', and that's finally what's left in the string:

	$string =~ s/(\$\w+)/$1/eeg; # 'Say hello to Fred and Barney'

The /e will also silently ignore violations of strict, replacing undefined variable names with the empty string. Since I'm using the /e flag (twice even!), I have all of the same security problems I have with eval in its string form. If there's something odd in $foo , perhaps something like @{[ system "rm -rf /" ]} , then I could get myself in trouble.

To get around the security problem, I could also pull the values from a hash instead of evaluating variable names. Using a single /e, I can check the hash to ensure the value exists, and if it doesn't, I can replace the missing value with a marker, in this case ??? to signal that I missed something:

	my $string = 'This has $foo and $bar';

	my %Replacements = (
		foo  => 'Fred',
		);

	# $string =~ s/\$(\w+)/$Replacements{$1}/g;
	$string =~ s/\$(\w+)/
				exists $Replacements{$1} ? $Replacements{$1} : '???'
				/eg;

	print $string;

What's wrong with always quoting "$vars"?

The problem is that those double-quotes force stringification--coercing numbers and references into strings--even when you don't want them to be strings. Think of it this way: double-quote expansion is used to produce new strings. If you already have a string, why do you need more?

If you get used to writing odd things like these:

	print "$var";   	# BAD
	$new = "$old";   	# BAD
	somefunc("$var");	# BAD

You'll be in trouble. Those should (in 99.8% of the cases) be the simpler and more direct:

	print $var;
	$new = $old;
	somefunc($var);

Otherwise, besides slowing you down, you're going to break code when the thing in the scalar is actually neither a string nor a number, but a reference:

	func(\@array);
	sub func {
		my $aref = shift;
		my $oref = "$aref";  # WRONG
		}

You can also get into subtle problems on those few operations in Perl that actually do care about the difference between a string and a number, such as the magical ++ autoincrement operator or the syscall() function.

Stringification also destroys arrays.

	@lines = `command`;
	print "@lines";     # WRONG - extra blanks
	print @lines;       # right

Why don't my <<HERE documents work?

Check for these three things:

There must be no space after the << part.
There (probably) should be a semicolon at the end.
You can't (easily) have any space in front of the tag.

If you want to indent the text in the here document, you can do this:

    # all in one
    ($VAR = <<HERE_TARGET) =~ s/^\s+//gm;
        your text
        goes here
    HERE_TARGET

But the HERE_TARGET must still be flush against the margin. If you want that indented also, you'll have to quote in the indentation.

    ($quote = <<'    FINIS') =~ s/^\s+//gm;
            ...we will have peace, when you and all your works have
            perished--and the works of your dark master to whom you
            would deliver us. You are a liar, Saruman, and a corrupter
            of men's hearts.  --Theoden in /usr/src/perl/taint.c
        FINIS
    $quote =~ s/\s+--/\n--/;

A nice general-purpose fixer-upper function for indented here documents follows. It expects to be called with a here document as its argument. It looks to see whether each line begins with a common substring, and if so, strips that substring off. Otherwise, it takes the amount of leading whitespace found on the first line and removes that much off each subsequent line.

    sub fix {
        local $_ = shift;
        my ($white, $leader);  # common whitespace and common leading string
        if (/^\s*(?:([^\w\s]+)(\s*).*\n)(?:\s*\1\2?.*\n)+$/) {
            ($white, $leader) = ($2, quotemeta($1));
        } else {
            ($white, $leader) = (/^(\s+)/, '');
        }
        s/^\s*?$leader(?:$white)?//gm;
        return $_;
    }

This works with leading special strings, dynamically determined:

	$remember_the_main = fix<<'    MAIN_INTERPRETER_LOOP';
	@@@ int
	@@@ runops() {
	@@@     SAVEI32(runlevel);
	@@@     runlevel++;
	@@@     while ( op = (*op->op_ppaddr)() );
	@@@     TAINT_NOT;
	@@@     return 0;
	@@@ }
	MAIN_INTERPRETER_LOOP

Or with a fixed amount of leading whitespace, with remaining indentation correctly preserved:

	$poem = fix<<EVER_ON_AND_ON;
       Now far ahead the Road has gone,
	  And I must follow, if I can,
       Pursuing it with eager feet,
	  Until it joins some larger way
       Where many paths and errands meet.
	  And whither then? I cannot say.
		--Bilbo in /usr/src/perl/pp_ctl.c
	EVER_ON_AND_ON

Data: Arrays

What is the difference between a list and an array?

An array has a changeable length. A list does not. An array is something you can push or pop, while a list is a set of values. Some people make the distinction that a list is a value while an array is a variable. Subroutines are passed and return lists, you put things into list context, you initialize arrays with lists, and you foreach() across a list. @ variables are arrays, anonymous arrays are arrays, arrays in scalar context behave like the number of elements in them, subroutines access their arguments through the array @_ , and push/pop/shift only work on arrays.

As a side note, there's no such thing as a list in scalar context. When you say

	$scalar = (2, 5, 7, 9);

you're using the comma operator in scalar context, so it uses the scalar comma operator. There never was a list there at all! This causes the last value to be returned: 9.

What is the difference between $array[1] and @array[1]?

The former is a scalar value; the latter an array slice, making it a list with one (scalar) value. You should use $ when you want a scalar value (most of the time) and @ when you want a list with one scalar value in it (very, very rarely; nearly never, in fact).

Sometimes it doesn't make a difference, but sometimes it does. For example, compare:

	$good[0] = `some program that outputs several lines`;

with

	@bad[0]  = `same program that outputs several lines`;

The use warnings pragma and the -w flag will warn you about these matters.

How can I remove duplicate elements from a list or array?

(contributed by brian d foy)

Use a hash. When you think the words "unique" or "duplicated", think "hash keys".

If you don't care about the order of the elements, you could just create the hash then extract the keys. It's not important how you create that hash: just that you use keys to get the unique elements.

	my %hash   = map { $_, 1 } @array;
	# or a hash slice: @hash{ @array } = ();
	# or a foreach: $hash{$_} = 1 foreach ( @array );

	my @unique = keys %hash;

If you want to use a module, try the uniq function from List::MoreUtils . In list context it returns the unique elements, preserving their order in the list. In scalar context, it returns the number of unique elements.

	use List::MoreUtils qw(uniq);

	my @unique = uniq( 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 5, 7 ); # 1,2,3,4,5,6,7
	my $unique = uniq( 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 5, 6, 5, 7 ); # 7

You can also go through each element and skip the ones you've seen before. Use a hash to keep track. The first time the loop sees an element, that element has no key in %Seen . The next statement creates the key and immediately uses its value, which is undef, so the loop continues to the push and increments the value for that key. The next time the loop sees that same element, its key exists in the hash and the value for that key is true (since it's not 0 or undef), so the next skips that iteration and the loop goes to the next element.

	my @unique = ();
	my %seen   = ();

	foreach my $elem ( @array )
		{
		next if $seen{ $elem }++;
		push @unique, $elem;
		}

You can write this more briefly using a grep, which does the same thing.

	my %seen = ();
	my @unique = grep { ! $seen{ $_ }++ } @array;

How can I tell whether a certain element is contained in a list or array?

(portions of this answer contributed by Anno Siegel)

Hearing the word "in" is an indication that you probably should have used a hash, not a list or array, to store your data. Hashes are designed to answer this question quickly and efficiently. Arrays aren't.

That being said, there are several ways to approach this. If you are going to make this query many times over arbitrary string values, the fastest way is probably to invert the original array and maintain a hash whose keys are the first array's values.

	@blues = qw/azure cerulean teal turquoise lapis-lazuli/;
	%is_blue = ();
	for (@blues) { $is_blue{$_} = 1 }

Now you can check whether $is_blue{$some_color} . It might have been a good idea to keep the blues all in a hash in the first place.

If the values are all small integers, you could use a simple indexed array. This kind of an array will take up less space:

	@primes = (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31);
	@is_tiny_prime = ();
	for (@primes) { $is_tiny_prime[$_] = 1 }
	# or simply  @istiny_prime[@primes] = (1) x @primes;

Now you check whether $is_tiny_prime[$some_number].

If the values in question are integers instead of strings, you can save quite a lot of space by using bit strings instead:

	@articles = ( 1..10, 150..2000, 2017 );
	undef $read;
	for (@articles) { vec($read,$_,1) = 1 }

Now check whether vec($read,$n,1) is true for some $n .

These methods guarantee fast individual tests but require a re-organization of the original list or array. They only pay off if you have to test multiple values against the same array.

If you are testing only once, the standard module List::Util exports the function first for this purpose. It works by stopping once it finds the element. It's written in C for speed, and its Perl equivalent looks like this subroutine:

	sub first (&@) {
		my $code = shift;
		foreach (@_) {
			return $_ if &{$code}();
		}
		undef;
	}

If speed is of little concern, the common idiom uses grep in scalar context (which returns the number of items that passed its condition) to traverse the entire list. This does have the benefit of telling you how many matches it found, though.

	my $is_there = grep $_ eq $whatever, @array;

If you want to actually extract the matching elements, simply use grep in list context.

	my @matches = grep $_ eq $whatever, @array;

How do I compute the difference of two arrays? How do I compute the intersection of two arrays?

Use a hash. Here's code to do both and more. It assumes that each element is unique in a given array:

	@union = @intersection = @difference = ();
	%count = ();
	foreach $element (@array1, @array2) { $count{$element}++ }
	foreach $element (keys %count) {
		push @union, $element;
		push @{ $count{$element} > 1 ? \@intersection : \@difference }, $element;
		}

Note that this is the symmetric difference, that is, all elements in either A or in B but not in both. Think of it as an xor operation.

How do I test whether two arrays or hashes are equal?

The following code works for single-level arrays. It uses a stringwise comparison, and does not distinguish defined versus undefined empty strings. Modify if you have other needs.

	$are_equal = compare_arrays(\@frogs, \@toads);

	sub compare_arrays {
		my ($first, $second) = @_;
		no warnings;  # silence spurious -w undef complaints
		return 0 unless @$first == @$second;
		for (my $i = 0; $i < @$first; $i++) {
			return 0 if $first->[$i] ne $second->[$i];
			}
		return 1;
		}

For multilevel structures, you may wish to use an approach more like this one. It uses the CPAN module FreezeThaw :

	use FreezeThaw qw(cmpStr);
	@a = @b = ( "this", "that", [ "more", "stuff" ] );

	printf "a and b contain %s arrays\n",
		cmpStr(

Manual:

Reference:

Links:

Contact:

NAME

DESCRIPTION

Data: Numbers

Why am I getting long decimals (eg, 19.9499999999999) instead of the numbers I should be getting (eg, 19.95)?

Why is int() broken?

Why isn't my octal data interpreted correctly?

Does Perl have a round() function? What about ceil() and floor()? Trig functions?

How do I convert between numeric representations/bases/radixes?

Why doesn't & work the way I want it to?

How do I multiply matrices?

How do I perform an operation on a series of integers?

How can I output Roman numerals?

Why aren't my random numbers random?

How do I get a random number between X and Y?

Data: Dates

How do I find the day or week of the year?

How do I find the current century or millennium?

How can I compare two dates and find the difference?

How can I take a string and turn it into epoch seconds?

How can I find the Julian Day?

How do I find yesterday's date?

Does Perl have a Year 2000 problem? Is Perl Y2K compliant?

Data: Strings

How do I validate input?

How do I unescape a string?

How do I remove consecutive pairs of characters?

How do I expand function calls in a string?

How do I find matching/nesting anything?

How do I reverse a string?

How do I expand tabs in a string?

How do I reformat a paragraph?

How can I access or change N characters of a string?

How do I change the Nth occurrence of something?

How can I count the number of occurrences of a substring within a string?

How do I capitalize all the words on one line?

How can I split a [character] delimited string except when inside [character]?

How do I strip blank space from the beginning/end of a string?

How do I pad a string with blanks or pad a number with zeroes?

How do I extract selected columns from a string?

How do I find the soundex value of a string?

How can I expand variables in text strings?

What's wrong with always quoting "$vars"?

Why don't my <<HERE documents work?

Data: Arrays

What is the difference between a list and an array?

What is the difference between $array[1] and @array[1]?

How can I remove duplicate elements from a list or array?

How can I tell whether a certain element is contained in a list or array?

How do I compute the difference of two arrays? How do I compute the intersection of two arrays?

How do I test whether two arrays or hashes are equal?