Notes » perl

Excel Deletes Leading 0s When Opening a CSV File

Alex — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:43:30 +0000

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

How to use Perl’s ternary operator

Alex — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 03:46:21 +0000

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.

Check String for Non-ASCII Characters in Perl

Alex — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 20:19:21 +0000

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.

Active Perl’s Package Manager: ppm

Alex — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 02:06:54 +0000

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/

Perl’s KinoSearch vs Plucene

Alex — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:33:59 +0000

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