How to count occurrences of a substring in scalar?

Hello all,

My Perl skills are not the greatest in the world. If any kind people out there can give me some guidance, I would be very grateful.

I have a scaler, $result, which contains the output of the iwgetfilejobs command line tool. So, for example, $result might contain this string:

\default\main\Internet\WORKAREA\workarea\about\default.asp job=16682 task=16704 job=16706 task=16716

I need to be able to do the following:

1. Determine if there is more than one occurrence of "job=" in $result.

2. Extract all the job ids from $result and put them into an array, @jobs.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

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Comments

Jeremy

Hi,

Here is one way of doing it - it justs puts all the occurances on the jobID in an array:

$str = qq(\default\main\Internet\WORKAREA\workarea\about\default.asp job=16682 task=16704 job=16706 task=16716 );
@jobIDarray = ($str =~ m|job=(\d*)|g);

@jobIDarray now contains : 16682 and 16706

HTH

Jeremy

Adam Stoller

Here's some code that we've been using at my customer site - I'm not sure it makes sense without the rest of the context, but I've tried to genericize it where possible for here:

use TeamSite::Config;
my $iwhome = TeamSite::Config::iwgethome();
#...
#======================================================================
# @arrFullPath contains a list of full vpaths to files that
# I want to check with regard to the jobids
#======================================================================
my %hashJobs;
$cmd = qq($iwhome/bin/iwgetfilejobs @arrFullPath);
@temp = qx($cmd 2>&1);

my $result = join("", @temp);

$result =~ s/\njob/:job/gs;
$result =~ s/\ttask/:task/gs;

my @list = split(/\n/, $result);
foreach my $e (@list){
    next if ($e =~ /^\s*$/);
    next if ($e !~ /:job=/);
    my @line = split(/:/, $e);
    my $file = shift(@line);
    for (my $i = 0; $i <= @line; $i += 2){
        my $jid = $line[$i] || "";
        my $tid = $line[$i+1] || "";
        next if ($jid =~ /^\s*$/);
        #============================================================
        # This code was written to be run within the context of
        # a workflow's externaltask script, intJobID is the current
        # Job's ID, and we eliminate it from the list here.
        #============================================================
        next if ($jid =~ /job=$intJobID$/);
        $hashJobs{"$file"}->{data} .= "($jid, $tid)";
    }
}
#======================================================================
# I now have a hash containing all the jobs that any file, that I am
# interested in, belongs to - other than the current job.
# From here, I could get a list of files in other jobs just by looking
# at a list of keys for %hashJobs.  If I want to report more detailed
# information to the end-user (or administrator) I can parse through
# the values associated with each key, to let them know the other
# job ID(s) that each file belongs to.
#======================================================================

Depending on your needs, the code could probably be greatly simplified - like if you only want it to deal with one file at a time and/or return a boolean response, etc. We needed the information captured this way, so this is how we did it.
Hope it helps.

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

B80116

Thank you both very much!

This is exactly what I needed!

gzevin

to add - what you have asked, is a FAQ. This is from FAQ on perl Smiley Very Happy

ata Manipulation. I found it with google's 'I'm feeling lucky'

:

-----------------------------------

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 charcters 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";

Greg Zevin, Ph.D. Comp. Sc.
Independent Interwoven Consultant/Architect
Sydney, AU

haplo

there is a easiest way to count something in a string.Just use a regex...

$str="\default\main\Internet\WORKAREA\workarea\about\default.asp job=16682 task=16704 job=16706 task=16716";
my $test = $str =~s/job/job/g;

the value of $test is 2 since the return code of a substitution regex is the number of times the regex matched.