Question

I have the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
# splits.pl

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $pivotfile = "myPath/Internal_Splits_Pivot.txt";

open PIVOTFILE, $pivotfile or die $!;

while (<PIVOTFILE>) { # loop through each line in file

    next if ($. == 1); # skip first line (contains business segment code)
    next if ($. == 2); # skip second line (contains transaction amount text)

    my @fields = split('\t',$_);  # split fields for line into an array     

    print scalar(grep $_, @fields), "\n"; 

}

Given that the data in the text file is this:

    4   G   I   M   N   U   X
    Transaction Amount  Transaction Amount  Transaction Amount  Transaction Amount  Transaction Amount  Transaction Amount  Transaction Amount
0000-13-I21             600         
0001-8V-034BLA              2,172   2,172       
0001-8V-191GYG                  13,125      4,375
0001-9W-GH5B2A  -2,967.09       2,967.09    25.00           

I would expect the output from the perl script to be: 2 3 3 4 given the amount of defined elements in each line. The file is a tab delimited text file with 8 columns.

Instead I get 3 4 3 4 and I have no idea why!

For background, I am using Counting array elements in Perl as the basis for my development, as I am trying to count the number of elements in the line to know if I need to skip that line or not.

Answer 1

Your code works for me. The problem may be that the input file contains some “hidden” whitespace fields (eg. other whitespace than tabs). For instance

• A<tab><space><CR> gives two fields, A and <space><CR>
• A<tab>B<tab><CR> gives three, A, B, <CR> (remember, the end of line is part of the input!)

I suggest you to chomp every line you use; other than that, you will have to clean the array from whitespace-only fields. Eg.

scalar(grep /\S/, @fields)

should do it.