Question

How to use pointer concepts in Perl? For example I have a line and want to search for the given string any where in the that line by positioning using the pointer. Kindly suggest me.

So I have 2 files with a key it like in 1st file I have data as in following columns with value in it as…

ID|Rating_Provider|Time|QualityRating z6Y1kWFT99|S&P_LONG|20110120 12:00:00 AM|NR z6Y1kWFT99|MOODY'S_LONG|20101101 12:00:00 AM|NR 

and in 2nd file I have data as in following columns in it as…

ID|BBCMPSEC|QualityRating_S&P_LONG|Time_S&P_LONG|QualityRating_MOODY'S_LONG|Time_‌​MOODY'S_LONG 

Now finally I need to see the data as…

ID|BBCMPSEC|QualityRating_S&P_LONG|Time_S&P_LONG|QualityRating_MOODY'S_LONG‌​|Time_MOODY'S_LONG z6Y1kWFT99|xxx|NR|20110120 12:00:00 AM.

Answer 1

ETA: Based on your comments, I would say that you’d be best off using Text::CSV. Take a look at the documentation, it is quite helpful. Basically, you would do something like:

use Text::CSV;
my $csv = Text::CSV->new({
    binary     => 1,
    sep_char   => "|",
});
open my $fh, "<", "inputfile" or die $!;

while (my $row = $csv->getline($fh)) {
    # @$row now contains your row data
}

---

Old answer

“pointers” are not used in perl. I assume you mean the position of the match. There are several ways. You can use index if you do not need any regexes:

perl -lwe 'print index("foobar", "bar");'

If you do need a regex, perhaps for some more complicated matches, you can use the predefined variable @-, which stores the position where your match begins:

perl -lwe '$str = "foobar"; if ($str =~ /bar/) { print $-[0] }'

However, I suggest you tell us what it is you are trying to do. Using string offsets is not the best perl tool in the box, and I suspect there are much better ways of solving your problem.