Question

Ok, I a have a data file with two columns of data. They are RecordNumber and Notes. They are separated by pipes and look like this.

Record1|1234567890 username notes notes notes notes 1254184921 username notes notes notes notes|

… This goes on for thousands of records.

Using a perl script (and possible some regex) I need to take the notes column and parse it out to make 3 new columns separated with pipes to load into a table. The columns need to be Note_Date|Note_Username|Note_Text.

The 10-digit string of numbers throughout the notes column is a unix timestamp. My second task is to take this and convert it to a regular timestamp. Please, any help would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

You may need to modify this for your needs:

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<>) {
        my @a = split(/\|/);
        while ($a[1]=~/\s*(\d+)\s+(\w+)\s+([^0-9]*)/g) {
                my ($t, $u, $n) = ($1, $2, $3);
                $t = localtime($t);
                print $a[0], "|$t $u $n|\n";
        }
}