Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi all, I'm going bonkers trying to figure something out that is probably simple for most of you. I have a choice between getting therapy for this or coming here to ask for help. I chose the latter.

What I'm trying to do is perform a split on a line but only one split. For example, let's say I have the following line:

fieldname:this is a sentence: here is another: here is one more.

and the delimiter I want to split on is ":". I want to split this into two strings. The first will contain the value "fieldname". The second will contain the value "this is a sentence: here is another: here is one more."

So the goal is to do a split but just one per line. Any additional delimiters in the line would be ignored. The only thing I've accomplished so far (repeatedly... lol) is getting the second string set to either "this is a sentence" or nothing at all. Is what I'm trying to do possible?

Thanks very much for any tips you can offer.

One way:

Code:

my ($fName,$sentence,$another,$more) = split /:/, $line;
my $rest = "$sentence".":"."$another".":"."$more";

Another way:

Code:

$line =~ s#:#@#;      This will replace first occurrence of : with @
my ($fName,$rest) = split /@/, $line;

Escape special characters where required.!!

Thank you! I had been changing the first delimiter in the input file but did not think to try that within the script itself. Doh!

I went with your second option since I don't know how many other delimiters will be in each line. It's working fine now, and I won't have to change any input files.

Thank you again. I really do appreciate it!!

Hi.

There is also a limit that can be placed on split:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

# @(#) p1	Demonstrate split with limit.

$text = "fieldname:this is a sentence: here is another: here is one more.";

($v1,$v2) = split /:/, $text, 2;

print " v1 = [$v1]\n";
print " v2 = [$v2]\n";

producing:

Code:

% ./p1
 v1 = [fieldname]
 v2 = [this is a sentence: here is another: here is one more.]

See perldoc -f split for more information and details ... cheers, drl

Very cool, I had no idea it was possible to do that. Thanks!