Excel Deletes Leading 0s When Opening a CSV File

July 1st, 2010 Alex Posted in excel, perl, programming, windows Comments Off

If you want Excel to keep a field’s leading zeros when opening a CSV file using Excel, you can change it to =”value”.

For example, if you have a row with 4 values that looks like this:

test,00016102,test,test

Just change it to:

test,="00016102",test,test
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How to use Perl’s ternary operator

July 6th, 2009 Alex Posted in perl, programming Comments Off

The Ternary Operator

The ternary is actually a sequence of operators. The operator is used like this:

CONDITION-PART ? TRUE-PART : FALSE-PART

which is shorthand for the following statement:

if (CONDITION-PART) {

TRUE-PART

} else {

FALSE-PART

}

Example: If $firstVar is zero, then assign $secondVar a value of zero. Otherwise, assign $secondVar the value in the first element in the array @array.

$secondVar = ($firstVar == 0) ? 0 : $array[0];

via Perl 5 By Example.

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Check String for Non-ASCII Characters in Perl

November 1st, 2008 Alex Posted in perl, programming Comments Off


if ( $string =~ /[[:^ascii:]]/ ) {
print "String contains characters that are NOT pure ASCII";
}
else {
print "Everything is good, string/pure is valid ASCII.";
}

E.G.: If it contains bytes > 127, it’s not valid ASCII.

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Active Perl’s Package Manager: ppm

August 6th, 2008 Alex Posted in perl, programming, slackware Comments Off

It allows you to get Perl pre-compiled packages. You can avoid installing a C compiler which is needed for some packages (KinoSearch for example).

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Downloads/ActivePerl/PPM/

Alternate packages repositories:
http://cpan.uwinnipeg.ca/PPMPackages/10xx/

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Perl’s KinoSearch vs Plucene

July 17th, 2008 Alex Posted in linux, perl, programming, windows Comments Off

KinoSearch is the winner

The following perl scripts index *.txt in the current folder and search for “TEST”. The first one is using Perl’s KinoSearch module and the other one is using Plucene. KinoSearch is alot faster then Plucene and also gives better results.

(right click to download)

KinoSearch.pl

Plucene.pl

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