Question

I have an array where the elements look like this (whitespaces included)

@array = (
"    795     0|  1",
"      5   135| 17",
"     12   161| 17",
"    244    22| 17",
"     11    25| 17",
"    249   389| 17",
"  22383   443| 17"
);

I need to take an element out

"    795     0|  1"

and split it into 3 numbers getting rid of the white spaces and “|” in each line.

@new_array =("795","0","1");

The problem I’m having is that the whitespace and size of the numbers varies.

Answer 1

I would use a regexp matching only the numbers:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict ;
use warnings ;
use Data::Dumper ;

my @array = (
"    795     0|  1",
"      5   135| 17",
"     12   161| 17",
"    244    22| 17",
"     11    25| 17",
"    249   389| 17",
"  22383   443| 17"
);

foreach my $item ( @array ) {
  my @tmp = $item =~ m/(\d+)/g ;
  printf "'%s' => %s\n" , $item , Dumper( \@tmp ) ;
}

This will also work if the string has no whitespace in the beginning.