Removing Duplicate Headings

[Shroom]

Im somewhat stuck on a project im working on and im pretty new to Perl, so i hope some perl heads can help me out here:)

I have an array that looks somewhat like this:

heading 1
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
heading 1
data2keep
data2keep
heading 2
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
heading 2
data2keep
data2keep
heading 3
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
.
.

Now as you see, headings occur several times even tho they are identical. (This due to page shifts in a SAP file export)
I want only one ocurance of each heading.

So, the result should look like:

heading 1
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
heading 2
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep
heading 3
data2keep
data2keep
data2keep

So far i have this code, but it just identifies the linenumbers of where a new "block" starts:

foreach (@data) {
    if ($_ =~ m/heading/) {
        $_{$_}++;
        unless($_{$_} > 1) {
            push(@block,"\t$i\t $_\n");
        }
    }
    $i++;
}
 

So, i need some function to do splice on those headers i dont want.
Hope anyone can help.

[kevin24]

Hi

Welcome to perl scripts!

If your particularly looking to splice a function, then see perl slice function in "tizag.com" which i suggest a good learning online site...

See if that helps you..

Best regards,

Kevin..

[numberwhun]

Not to be nit-picky, but please do not top post (post on top of others postings).

there?
is
now
backwards,
discussion
a
read
to
trying
like
nothing
is
there
Because

Regards,

Jeff

[KevinADC]

One of probably many ways to do what you want using a hash of arrays to store the data and another array to maintain heading order:

use strict;
use warnings;
chomp(my @data = <DATA>);
my @order = ();
my %HoA = ();
my $heading;
foreach my $line (@data) {
   if ($line =~ m/^heading/) {
      $heading = $line;
      if (!exists $HoA{$line}) {
         push @order,$line;
      }
   }
   else {
      push @{$HoA{$heading}},$line;
   }
}
 
foreach my $line (@order){
   print $line,"\n",join("\n",@{$HoA{$line}}),"\n";
}
 
__DATA__
heading 1
data2keep-1
data2keep-1
data2keep-1
heading 1
data2keep-1
data2keep-1
heading 2
data2keep-2
data2keep-2
data2keep-2
data2keep-2
heading 2
data2keep-2
data2keep-2
heading 3
data2keep-3
data2keep-3
data2keep-3