Question

I am running into a strange issue in perl that I can’t seem to find an answer for.

I have a small script that will parse data from an external sorce (be it file, website, etc). Once the data has been parsed, it will then save it to a CSV file. However, the issue is when I am writing the file or printing to screen the data, it seems to be truncating the beginning of the string. I am using strict and warnings and I am not seeing any errors.

Here is an example:

print "Name: " . $name . "\n";
print "Type: " . $type. "\n";
print "Price: " . $price . "\n";
print "Count: " . $count . "\n";

It will return the following:

John
Blue
7.99
5

If I attempt to do it this way:

print "$name,$type,$price,$count\n";

I get the following as a result:

,7.99,5

I tried the following to see where the issue begins and get the following:

print "$name\n";
print "$name,$type\n";
print "$name,$type,$price\n";
print "$name,$type,$price,$count\n";

Results:

John
John,Blue
,7.99
,7.99,5

I am still learning perl, but can’t seem to find out (maybe due to lack of knowledge) of what is causing this. I tried debugging the script, but I did not see any special character in the price variable that would cause this.

Answer 1

Per @Mat suggestion I ran the output through hexdump -C and found there was a carriage return (indicated by the hex value 0d). Using the code $price =~ s/\r//g; to remove the CR from the line of text fixed the problem.

Also, the input file was in Windows format not Unix, ran the command dos2unix to fix that.