Question

I’m writing this Perl script that gets two command line arguments: a directory and a year. In this directory is a ton of text files or html files(depending on the year). Lets say for instance it’s the year 2010 which contains files that look like this <number>rank.html with the number ranging from 2001 to 2212. I want it to open each file individually and take a part of the title in the html file and print it to a text file. However, when I run my code it just prints the first files title to the text file. It seems that it only ever opens the first file 2001rank.html and no others. I’ll post the code below and thanks to anyone that helps.

my $directory = shift or "Must supply directory\n";
my $year = shift or "Must supply year\n";

unless (-d $directory) {
  die "Error: Directory must be a directory\n";
}

unless ($directory =~ m/\/$/) {
  $directory = "$directory/";
}

open COLUMNS, "> columns$year.txt" or die "Can't open columns file";
my $column_name;

for (my $i = 2001; $i <= 2212; $i++) {

  if ($year >= 2009) {
    my $html_file = $directory.$i."rank.html";
    open FILE, $html_file;

    #check if opened correctly, if not, skip it
    unless (defined fileno(FILE)) {
      print "skipping $html_file\n";
      next;
    }

    $/ = "\n";
    my $line = <FILE>;

    if (defined $line) {
      $column_name = "";
      $_ = <FILE> until m{</title>};
      $_ =~ m{<title>CIA - The World Factbook -- Country Comparison :: (.+)</title>}i;
      $column_name = $1;
    }
    else {
      close FILE;
      next;
    }
    close FILE;
  }
  else {
    my $text_file = $directory.$i."rank.txt";
    open FILE, $text_file;

    unless (defined fileno(FILE)) {
      print "skipping $text_file\n";
      next;
    }

    $/ = "\r";
    my $line = <FILE>;

    if (defined $line) {
      $column_name = "";
      $_ = <FILE> until /Rank/i;
      $_ =~ /Rank(\s+)Country(\s+)(.+)(\s+)Date/i;
      $column_name = $3;
    }
    else {
      close FILE;
      next;
    }
    close FILE;
  }

  print "Adding $column_name to text file\n";
  print COLUMNS "$column_name\n";
}

close COLUMNS;

In other words $column_name gets set equal to the same thing every pass in the loop, even though I know the html files are different.

Answer 1

You’ll probably be able to debug this a lot faster if you convert using local lexicals for your filehandles instead of globals, as well as turn on strict checking:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (...)
{
    # ...
    open my $filehandle, $html_file;

    # ...
    my $line = <$filehandle>;
}

This way, the filehandle(s) will go out of scope during each loop iteration, so you can more clearly see what exactly is being referenced and where. (Hint: you may have missed a condition where the filehandle gets closed, so it is improperly reused the next time around.)

For more on best practices with open and filehandles, see:

• Why is three-argument open calls with autovivified filehandles a Perl best practice?
• What's the best way to open and read a file in Perl?

Some other points:

• Don’t ever explicitly assign to $_, that’s asking for trouble. Declare your own variable to hold your data: my $line = <$filehandle> (as in the example above)
• Pull out your matches directly into variables, rather than using $1, $2 etc, and only use parentheses for the portions you actually need: my ($column_name) = ($line =~ m/Rank\s+Country\s+.+(\s+)Date/i);
• put the error conditions first, so the bulk of your code can be outdented one (or more) level(s). This will improve readability, as when the bulk of your algorithm is visible on the screen at once, you can better visualize what it is doing and catch errors.

If you apply the points above I’m pretty sure that you’ll spot your error. I spotted it while making this last edit, but I think you’ll learn more if you discover it yourself. (I’m not trying to be snooty; trust me on this!)