Perl read file and split into variables issue

Question

Must look dumb, but I have a little Perl code to read a file with contents like this:

John|Doe
John|Smith
No|Name
Ozzy|Osbourne

I want to read the file and get the data as variables $firstname $lastname:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open(DB, "$ARGV[0]") || die ":: Can't open database.\n";

my $line;

foreach $line (<DB>){
  chomp $line;
  $line =~ s/^\s+//;
  $line =~ s/\s+$//;
  my ($firstname, $lastname) = split /|/, $line;
  print "Firstname: $firstname - Lastname: $lastname\n";
}

What I get is:

Firstname: J - Lastname: o
Firstname: J - Lastname: o
Firstname: N - Lastname: o
Firstname: O - Lastname: z

First and second characters. Where am I wrong?

same result, tried also "|"

bsteo
– bsteo

2014-03-11 14:09:35 +00:00
Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 14:09 — bsteo
– bsteo, Commented Mar 11, 2014 at 14:09

ikegami · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-11 14:10:14Z

9

Split takes a regular expression. If you want to match | literally, you need to escape it.

split /\|/, $line;

answered Mar 11, 2014 at 14:10

ikegami

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1 Comment

Zach Leighton Over a year ago

did not know that, gotta love perl

codejunkie · Accepted Answer · 2014-03-18 05:47:28Z

0

You can do it without using split, with regex

open(FH,test.txt);
my @array=<FH>;

foreach(@array)
{
$_=~ m/(\w+)\|(\w+)/;
print "Firstname: $1 ,Lastname: $2 \n";
}

answered Mar 18, 2014 at 5:47

codejunkie

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