Help with perl

[rfr3sh]

anyone good with perl scripting and is willing to help me with something easy

just pm or msg here

[rfr3sh]

would it help if i specified what exactly I needed help with

[Flying Dutchman]

I gave pearls to my GF once.

sorry, not a language I use.

[rfr3sh]

alright thanks, im looking for sycoogit i know he can help but hes MIA

[FreeFall]

I can give it a shot if you'd like.

[rfr3sh]

well I have figured out the original problem. now when i try to access my web server i get this message

"
Can't locate ../cfg.pl in @INC (@INC contains: C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib C:/strawberry/perl/vendor/lib C:/strawberry/perl/lib .) at C:/Program Files (x86)/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/cgi-bin/line_movements/index.cgi line 7.
For help, please send mail to the webmaster (admin@phub.net.cable.rogers.com), giving this error message and the time and date of the error."


but i placed the cfg.pl in C:/strawberry/perl/site/lib

[Maverick22]

What folder is the "executable" in? Its looking up a directory ("../cfg.pl"). Is cfg.pl in the parent folder of whatever file is looking for it?

[rfr3sh]

now it is and it can find it thanks

[Maverick22]

You may want to edit the code to have the configuration file in the same directory as the main program. If you ever have to move code, it could get confusing...

Not sure what the "best practice" is... But I know this is commonly done...

Or make a sub folder called "config" and put all the configuration items there. And have the code look for this folder.

Just thoughts though...

[rfr3sh]

alright yeah I might do that, now on to the next problem this one file is looping forever and I cant figure out why

[Maverick22]

Programming And its headaches...

I just had to farm out some programming work, that i simply dont want to do myself... One of my old minions from college. LOL.

I dont know perl...but i can try to give it a shot (It cant be very worldly different from most other languages)... paste the code segment here or in the PM. I'll see if i can help any.... I'll look at anything but C++/Java... else my head will explode.

[rfr3sh]

pinnacle changing there website is giving me headaches now

for instance if im scraping

<td>Milwaukee Brewers</td>
<td>1.5&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
<td>187</td>

I am scraping td tags

however now in the new layout it is displayed as

<td class="linesTeam">Milwaukee Brewers<BR /><EM>M. Parra</EM></td>
<td class="linesSpread">+1.5&nbsp;-126</td>
<td class="linesMLine">+187</td>

so are td tags and td class tags the same or different

[Megaman]

pinnacle changing there website is giving me headaches now
...
so are td tags and td class tags the same or different

<td class="foo"> means a <td> with a specific ('foo') formating of the text. The meaning of 'foo' is described elsewhere.

[Ganchrow]

pinnacle changing there website is giving me headaches now

for instance if im scraping

<td>Milwaukee Brewers</td>
<td>1.5&nbsp;&nbsp;</td>
<td>187</td>

I am scraping td tags

however now in the new layout it is displayed as

<td class="linesTeam">Milwaukee Brewers<BR /><EM>M. Parra</EM></td>
<td class="linesSpread">+1.5&nbsp;-126</td>
<td class="linesMLine">+187</td>

so are td tags and td class tags the same or different

When I want to match a td tag with a regular expression I use:

m/<td[^>]*>/si

This tells Perl to match a (potentially multiline) string beginning with the substring '<td' followed by any number of characters that are not '>', and then ending with the closing '>'.

[Ganchrow]

And of course if you wanted to get the contents within the <td></td> tag pair then (assuming you were reading from STDIN) you could use:

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;


while(<>) {
	if (m!<td[^>]*>(.*?)</td[^>]*>!si) {
		warn $1;
	}
}

With $1 containing the matched substring.

[rockchalk24]

Ganchrow!

[FreeFall]

When I want to match a td tag with a regular expression I use:

m/<td[^>]*>/si

This tells Perl to match a (potentially multiline) string beginning with the substring '<td' followed by any number of characters that are not '>', and then ending with the closing '>'.

Man I don't think anyone understands the power of regular expressions. I get so frustrated when I'm unable to use them. I <3 Perl.

[byronbb]

I just started with Perl only ever having used Pascal before and I am loving it.

[vyomguy]

I know perl and I am a software engineer.

[Saab]

for pinny's lines you might be better in the long run using an actual xml library, not simply matching regular expressions... just my 2 cents though

[rfr3sh]

[rockchalk24]

FWIW, using regexps to parse html is probably a bad idea. The module HTML::Parse would help alot.

[Ganchrow]

FWIW, using regexps to parse html is probably a bad idea. The module HTML::Parse would help alot.

And what, pray tell, do you think that the now deprecated HTML::Parse module and its more robust offspring use internally?

1. magic
2. regular expressions

It's not magic.

[trixtrix]

ganchrow is back???

we missed you man!! hope all is well


here have some SBR points

[vyomguy]

The power of perl comes with regex...USE IT.

[rockchalk24]

And what, pray tell, do you think that the now deprecated HTML::Parse module and its more robust offspring use internally?

1. magic
2. regular expressions

It's not magic.

Yeah, I know it uses regular expressions. That doesn't mean you should use them manually. Your work is a lot easier when most of it is done by a module.

[Ganchrow]

Yeah, I know it uses regular expressions. That doesn't mean you should use them manually. Your work is a lot easier when most of it is done by a module.

I'm sorry, my earlier response was overly sarcastic. That was rude of me.

Personally, I'm more of a do-it-yourself type guy and find that packaging my own regex parsing routines works infinitely better than calling prebuilt one-size-fits-all methods. But you're right ... a neophyte Perl programmer (referring to the OP) would likely have an easier go starting off with preexisting modules.

That said, regular expressions are certainly one of Perl's most powerful features and I think it behooves anyone seeking to learn the language to spend time honing his or her regex skillz.

I mean how else could one endeavor creates gems like this:

perl -e "print grep ord $_,map{y/)!#@'%{];/0-8/;y/,0-9/--/c;s/[^0-9-]//g;$x.=qq~+$_~;chr eval $x;}q<Steve],'John Walker'@h`#nW1 SBR_;,,,'Loshak@@o'%EoG1er%DozerRX`1#Ricky_P@eROCK1@|`;#r';l#1CHALK1@Ax_{a`]{c')k#%,er#,wx;JJ_y{tWo1@&`;1FOUR_#@the end>=~m#([^\|&*\\ a-z]+)#gi#tr/-0-9//d;JenBird Long Live Tow! print RBS trixtrix Dozer Walker;"

[rfr3sh]

Granchow could I pm you a question

[Ganchrow]

Granchow could I pm you a question

You can post it here and if I have the time and find it sufficiently interesting I'll give it a shot.

[rockchalk24]

I'm sorry, my earlier response was overly sarcastic. That was rude of me.

Personally, I'm more of a do-it-yourself type guy and find that packaging my own regex parsing routines works infinitely better than calling prebuilt one-size-fits-all methods. But you're right ... a neophyte Perl programmer (referring to the OP) would likely have an easier go starting off with preexisting modules.

That said, regular expressions are certainly one of Perl's most powerful features and I think it behooves anyone seeking to learn the language to spend time honing his or her regex skillz.

I mean how else could one endeavor creates gems like this:

perl -e "print grep ord $_,map{y/)!#@'%{];/0-8/;y/,0-9/--/c;s/[^0-9-]//g;$x.=qq~+$_~;chr eval $x;}q<Steve],'John Walker'@h`#nW1 SBR_;,,,'Loshak@@o'%EoG1er%DozerRX`1#Ricky_P@eROCK1@|`;#r';l#1CHALK1@Ax_{a`]{c')k#%,er#,wx;JJ_y{tWo1@&`;1FOUR_#@the end>=~m#([^\|&*\\ a-z]+)#gi#tr/-0-9//d;JenBird Long Live Tow! print RBS trixtrix Dozer Walker;"

That kind of complexity reminds me of my favorite use of regular expressions:

sub is_prime { 
    my ($number) = @_; 
    return (1 x $number) !~ m/\A (?: 1? | (11+?) (?> \1+ ) ) \Z/xms; 
}

(take from Perl Best Practices)