[Fun With Perl] Everything should be kept as simple as possible...

[Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>]

This came over the MacPerl list recently:

At 09:21 -0400 6/16/99, he-who-shall-be-nameless wrote:
> I am trying to sort a simple text file:
>
> Janssen||Willem
> Hinders||Trintje
> Beving||John
> Beving||Henrietta
> Beving||Ubbe
> Beving||Henry
> Beving||Henry
> Beving||Etta
> Beving||Minnie
> Beving||Bertha
> Willemssen||male
> Willemssen||male
> Willemssen||Wopka(e)
> Brower||Coba
> Brower||John
> Brower||Bertha
>
> I'm using the following code and it does not seem to sort them.
>
> if(open(INFILE,"names.txt") || die("Cannot open names.txt")) {
> 	while (<INFILE>) {
> 		@fields = $_;
> 		foreach $field (@fields) {
> 			@array = split /\|\|/, $field;
> 			@array = sort(@array);
> 			chomp($array[0],$array[1]);
> 			$lastname = $array[0];
> 			$firstname = $array[1];
> 			print "$lastname, $firstname\n";
> 		}
> 	}
> 	close(INFILE);
> }
>
> It does not seem to work. Is there something I'm missing in the code?

>From there, the discussion went off why the poster's code didn't work, and
thence into Schwartzian Transforms and fancy variations thereof:

> open(INFILE,"names.txt") || die("Cannot open names.txt: $!\n");
> @sorted =
>    map { "$_->[0], $_->[1]" }
>    sort { $a->[0] cmp $b->[0] || $a->[1] cmp $b->[1] }
>    map { chomp; [ split /\|\|/ ] } <INFILE>;
>    $, = "\n";
> print @sorted;
> close(INFILE);

And Much Discussion ensued.

I looked at the data.
I looked at the (assumed) required output (a simple sorted list,
supposedly).
And I thought: K.I.S.S.

My entry into the discussion:

  #!perl

  open(IN, "names.txt") or die "Oops";

  @names = <IN>;

  # note this is an ASCII (case-sensitive) sort; you may want to
  # "improve" on that

  @names = sort @names;

  foreach (@names) {
    print;
	# note you could now split or substitute ", " for the || or...
  }

My solution seemed _so_ simple I was wondering if I'd just missed something
about the original problem. Or did the others not see the tree for the
forest? Did I achieve the Great Aha!?

I ran this past MJD and Randal before deciding to send it to FWP.

And Merlin out-Aha'd me!

At 13:06 -0700 6/17/99, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
> @ARGV = qw(names.txt);
> print sort <>; # would have worked as well

ooooooooooooooooooh 8*)

- Vicki
-- --
       |\      _,,,---,,_       Vicki Brown <vlb@cfcl.com>
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     '---''(_/--'  `-'\_) http://www.cfcl.com/~vlb  http://www.macperl.org

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