Using regular expressions to insert tags

[Sriram Rajagopalan]

Hello,

I have a text file in a columnar format. There are seven entries in a row, separated by tabs.

eg.

1       23      555     34      Corporation     Index   Sediment

This has to be tagged as:

<no>1</no><code>23</code><set>555</set><id>34</id><status>Corporation</status><value>Index</value><type>Sediment</type>

I have stored the file contents to $_ and I am using the regex

$_=~s/([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)\t/<no>$1<\/no><code>$2<\/code><set>$3<\/set><id>$4<\/id><status>$5<\/status><value>$6<\/value><type>$7<\/type>/g;

I am not able to get the text tagged. Can anyone help me out to get my desired codes?

Thanks,

Sriram

[Brad Baxter]

Your regex is expecting a tab after Sediment.  Is there one?

--
Brad

[Terrence Brannon]

Why not stick it in a hash and then use XML::Generator?

On 6/20/06, Sriram Rajagopalan <sriram.ra...@ggsinc.com > wrote:

[Johan Vromans]

Sriram Rajagopalan <sriram.ra...@ggsinc.com> writes:

> 1 23 555 34 Corporation Index Sediment
>
> This has to be tagged as:
> <no>1</no><code>23</code><set>555</set><id>34</id><status>Corporation</statu
> s><value>Index</value><type>Sediment</type>

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

# These are the desired tags.
my @tags = qw(no code set id status value type);

# The input.
my $line = "1 23 555 34 Corporation Index Sediment";

# Split into fields.
my @flds = split(/\t/, $line);

# Process the tags, mapping each with an actual value into a result array, and join.
my $result = join("",
map { "<$_>".shift(@flds)."</$_>"} @tags);

# Show it.
print $result, "\n";

Hapy hacking,

-- Johan

[Geoffrey Leach]

To assist you in finguring this out, you might try recoding using
s { }{ }/x - and lay out your regex over several lines so as to better
see what's going on. Also, if your data is consistent, (\d+)\s+ would
be lots faster.