Sanity check - table lookup

nipper

Se we have a bunch of vendor keys:

AAAB=Nike Inc
AAAC=Fish Co
etc...

I dumped these into a text file & am producing some reports wanting to convert from AAAB to Nike Inc

Since I am running this on thousands of objects DB lookups was not a great idea.

Here is what I came up with, looking for comments:

open(IN, "<type_conversion.txt") || die " 'type_conversion.txt' ($!)";
my @lines = <IN> ;
my %hash ;
foreach $line (@lines) {
chomp($line);
($key, $value) = split(/=/,$line) ;
$hash{$key} = $value;
}

$company = $hash("AAAB");

Any better way of doing this ? I have 400 lines in the list.

Comments ?

Adam Stoller

Well, I suppose you could have the actual type_conversion.txt file look like:

$hash{AAAB}="Nike Inc";
$hash{AAAC}="Fish Co";
...

And then have your script do something like:

my %hash = ();
my $code = '';
open(IN, "<type_conversion.txt") || die " 'type_conversion.txt' ($!)";
{
    local $/;
    $code = <IN>;
    close(IN);
}
eval($code);
# test results:
print "$_ : $hash{$_}\n" foreach(sort(keys(%hash)));

Note, you can also have blank lines and comments that begin with '#' in your type_conversion.txt file - other than using perhaps DBI::File, I think hashes will work best for storing this data.

For applying it ... well, that would then be something like:

foreach my $file (@flist){
    next if (-d $file || -B $file); # skip directories and binary files
    my $orig_txt = '';
    if (open(IN, "<$file")){
        { # I like to restrict the localized setting of $/
            local $/;
            $orig_txt = <IN>;
            close(IN);
        }
        my $new_txt = $orig_txt;
        $new_txt =~ s/$_/$hash{$_}/gs foreach(keys(%hash));
        if ($new_txt ne $orig_txt){
            if (open(OUT, ">$file")){
                print OUT $new_txt;
                close(OUT);
            }
            else { 
                # unable to write modified file
            }
        } # else file unchanged, nothing to do
    }
    else {
        # unable to read original file
    }
}

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com