Question

I have about 10-20K records and only need certain cities. I would like to make this work in perl but i can’t seem to find an example of just what i need. searchme.csv and list.csv if city is found delete record/row. I was sorting and splitting the screen but now there is just way to many to hand pick out. Please any help would be much appreciated. Im only a nueb.

1. searchme.csv contains rows with ‘name,address,city,state,zip,phone’ with header.
2. list.csv contains 1 row with header ‘city’ and 50+ rows of the cities that I want to keep.
3. So for each row in searchme.csv get the ‘city’ into a $variable and loop thru the list.csv if match found write the full row from searchme.csv to new file new.csv. the more i play with this i got it to loop over the searchme.csv, i think i need to load the cities.csv into and array and loop thru the array within the while loop. and if found print to new.csv.

Answer 1

I couldn’t quite tell from your last comment whether you’re still working on this, or not. In any case, here’s a solution to consider.

use strict;
use warnings FATAL => 'all';
use autodie qw(:all);

# slurp files into arrays
open my $RECORDSFILE, '<', 'searchme.csv';
my @records = <$RECORDSFILE>;
close $RECORDSFILE;

open my $LISTFILE, '<', 'list.csv';
my @citychecklist = <$LISTFILE>;
close $LISTFILE;

open my $NEWFILE, '>>', 'new.csv';

my $cityidx = 2;
my $item;
my $record;

# loop through each record and extract the city string
foreach $record (@records) {
    my @data = split qr/,/, $record;
    my $city = $data[$cityidx];
    # skip the header
    next if $city eq 'city';

    # compare the city string with each city in our other list
    foreach $item (@citychecklist) {
        chomp $item;
        # if we find a match write out the record to another file
        if ($city eq $item) {
            print {$NEWFILE} $record;
        }
    }
}

close $NEWFILE;