A.14 Chapter 15, Other Data Transformation

1. Here's one way to do it:

   while (<>) {
       chomp;
       $slash = rindex($_,"/");
       if ($slash > -1) {
           $head = substr($_,0,$slash);
           $tail = substr($_,$slash+1);
       } else {
           ($head,$tail) = ("", $_);
       }
       print "head = '$head', tail = '$tail'\n";
   }

   Each line read by the diamond operator is first chomped (tossing the newline). Next we look for the rightmost slash in the line, using rindex(). The next two lines break the string apart using substr(). If there's no slash, the result of the rindex is -1, so we hack around that. The final line within the loop prints the results.

2. Here's one way to do it:

   chomp(@nums = <STDIN>); # note special use of chomp
   @nums = sort { $a <=> $b } @nums;
   foreach (@nums) {
       printf "%30g\n", $_;
   }

   The first line grabs all of the numbers into the @nums array. The second line sorts the array numerically, using an inline definition for a sorting order. The foreach loop prints the results.

3. Here's one way to do it:

   open(PW,"/etc/passwd") || die "How did you get logged in?";
   while (<PW>) {
       chomp;
       ($user, $gcos) = (split /:/)[0,4];
       ($real) = split(/,/, $gcos);
       $real{$user} = $real;
       ($last) = (split /\s+/, $real)[-1];
       $last{$user} = "\L$last";
   }
   close(PW);
   
   for (sort by_last keys %last) {
       printf "%30s %8s\n", $real{$_}, $_;
   }
   
   sub by_last { ($last{$a} cmp $last{$b}) || ($a cmp $b) }

   The first loop creates %last hash, consisting of login names for keys and user's last names for the corresponding values, and the %real hash, containing the full real names instead. The last names are all converted to lowercase, so that FLINTSTONE, Flintstone, and flintstone all sort near each other.

   The second loop prints %real out, ordered by the values of %last, using the sort definition presented in by_last subroutine.

4. Here's one way to do it:

   while (<>) {
       substr($_,0,1) =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/;
       substr($_,1) =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;
       print;
   }

   For each line read by the diamond operator, we use two tr operators, each on a different portion of the string. The first tr operator uppercases the first character of the line, and the second tr operator lowercases the remainder. The result is printed.

   Here's another way to do this, using only double-quoted string operators:

   while (<>) {
       print "\u\L$_";
   }

   Give yourself an extra five points if you thought of that instead.