Read Character by Character in each line

[bmerlover]

I'm trying to read each line, character by character, to determine if a line has a semicolon in it. I'm trying to count the number of lines that have a semicolon. In all of the files in one directory.

I have 2 problems, one problem is it displays '.' and '..' and the subdirectory as files which I want it to avoid. I tried to use grep but I was unsuccessful. The second problem I'm having is that while it will read the amount of lines I have, I want it to only count the lines that have a semicolon in it. My approach to this problem was to read each line character by character and compare it to semicolon, if it matched than the line_count would increment by 1 otherwise goto next line.

 
#!/bin/perl
 
use strict;
#use warnings;
 
use File::Copy;
 
my $line_count = 0;
my $dir_name = "C:\\Example\\";
 
opendir DIR, $dir_name or die "Error opening dir\n";
 
#for each file in the directory, display the name and count the number of lines
foreach my $file (readdir DIR)
{
    print "File in $dir_name is $file \n";
 
    #need to put dir_name and file next to each other because
    #they are both strings which combined together locate the file.
    open (MYFILE, "$dir_name$file");
    #while we haven't gotten to the EOF, count the lines
    while (<MYFILE>) 
    {
        #my @lines = <MYFILE>;
 
        chomp;
        #if(@lines eq ';')
        #{
            $line_count++;
        #}
 
        print "$line_count";
        print "$_\n";
    }
    close (MYFILE);
 
    print "There are $line_count lines in $file\n\n";
 
    $line_count = 0;
}
 
closedir DIR;
 
 

In the meantime, I will continue to figure this out, if I do I will post the solution.
Thanks in advance for any help.

[d41]

'.' and '..' are two folders (I think) in every directory. '.' leads into the current directory, and '..' leads into the parent directory. If you're reading all the files in a foreach loop, you could just tell it next; if the filename is '.' or '..'. Or you could have it skip all filenames that start with a dot '.'.

For checking if a line has a semicolon, you can just use a regular expression or the index() function
regular expression: /;/ (Don't use a regular expression for something this simple, though)
or the index function: index($line,";"); will return the place it found a semicolon, or -1 if it didn't find a semicolon.

[numberwhun]

I would actually go a different direction with this. Taking into account that you want to not have the "." and "..", you would need to figure out how to do an "ls" of whatever directory it is and then scan each line (I would personally use a regular expression) for the semi colon.

Here is some code I put together a little while ago that does an "ls -rt" of a directory, only using strictly perl, no system() function.

### Declarations ###
my @filesarray;
my $directory;
 
### Test to ensure that there is only one directory supplied on the command line
if($#ARGV != "0")
{
   print("This script requires you to supply one and only one direcotry path.\n");
   print("Please re-execute this script with a directory path.\n");
   print("Usage:  lsrt.pl <directory_path>\n");
   exit();
}
 
### Take the argument supplied on the command line and put it into a variable
$directory = shift @ARGV;
 
### Change directories to the directory specified as an option to this script
chdir($directory);
 
### Take the files in the current directory (obtained through the glob <*>)
### and compare them, sorting them into the array by the oldest first.
### The variables $a and $b are used specifically by sort and if you
### reverse them here, you will get the sort in the reverse order with the
### newest as the first element of the array.
@filesarray = sort{ -M $b <=> -M $a } <*>;
 
### Print out the array, one element per line.
foreach(@filesarray)
{
    print("$_\n");
}
 

There should be plenty of comments there to enable you to understand it.

After you incorporate the bit that does the listing into your script, you will then have to examine each line (again, regex for that) for the ";".

But that is just another idea of what you can do. How you do it is up to you, I just wanted to share. (TIMTOWTDI)

Regards,

Jeff

[bmerlover]

Thanks a lot guys, I'm going to try both approaches to see what happens. d41 thanks for the filename comparison idea and your approach to checking semicolons. numberwhun your code makes it easier to see the bigger picture.

[KevinADC]

I would avoid doing this as a general rule:

@filesarray = sort{ -M $b <=> -M $a } <*>;

sorting files that way is slow and in this case there appears to be no reason to sort the files at all. The better way if you did have to sort the files would be to get all the -M values first then sort them. That way you never have to stat the same file more than once.

[bmerlover]

Ok thanks to your help guys, I found the solution. Here it is:

 
#!/bin/perl
 
use strict;
#use warnings;
 
my $line_count = 0;
my $dir_name = "C:\\Example\\";
 
opendir DIR, $dir_name or die "Error opening dir\n";
 
#for each file in the directory, display the name and count the number of lines
foreach my $file (readdir DIR)
{
    #every directory has '.' and '..' as folders, skip over them
    if($file eq '.')
    {
        next;
    }
    elsif($file eq '..')
    {
        next;
    }
 
    print "File in $dir_name is $file \n";
 
    #need to put dir_name and file next to each other because
    #they are both strings which combined together locate the file.
    open (MYFILE, "$dir_name$file");
    #while we haven't gotten to the EOF, count the lines
    while (<MYFILE>) 
    {
        chomp;
 
        my $result = index($_, ";");
 
        if($result != -1)
        {
            $line_count++;
        }    
 
        #print "\nresult: $result\n"
        print "$line_count";
        print "$_\n";
 
    }
    close (MYFILE);
 
    print "There are $line_count lines in $file\n\n";
 
    $line_count = 0;
}
 
closedir DIR;
 
 

[KevinADC]

Nothing wrong with your code, this is just less verbose:

#!/bin/perl
 
use strict;
use warnings;
my $dir_name = "C:\\Example\\";
opendir DIR, $dir_name or die "Error opening dir: $!\n";
readdir DIR; #skip '.'
readdir DIR; #skip '..'
 
while (my $file = readdir DIR){
   my $line_count = 0;
   print "File in $dir_name is $file \n";
   open (MYFILE, "$dir_name$file") or print "Could not open $file: $!\n";
   #while we haven't gotten to the EOF, count the lines
   while (<MYFILE>){
      chomp;
      $line_count++ if ( index($_, ';') > -1);
      print "$line_count\n";
   }
   close (MYFILE);
   print "There are $line_count lines in $file\n\n";
}
closedir DIR;