Question

Question is 2 fold:

1. I’m writing a perl (not to experienced with perl) script and can get it to convert one file at a time from csv to ascii. I want to do a loop that takes all csv’s in a folder and converts them to ascii/txt.

2. Is perl the best language to be attempting this with? I assumed yes since i can successfully do it one file at a time but having a very hard time figuring out a way to loop it.

I was trying to figure out how to load all the files into an array then run the loop for each one, but my googling has reached its limit and i’m out of ideas.
here’s my working script:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use autodie;

use open IN => ':encoding(UTF-16)';
use open OUT => ':encoding(ascii)';

my $buffer;

open(my $ifh, '<', 'Software_compname.csv');
read($ifh, $buffer, -s $ifh);
close($ifh);

open(my $ofh, '>', 'Software_compname.txt');
print($ofh $buffer);
close($ofh);

Answer 1

Just add the following loop to your script and give it the files to process as arguments:

for my $input_file (glob shift) {
    (my $output_file = $input_file) =~ s/csv$/txt/ or do {
        warn "Invalid file name: $input_file\n";
        next;
    };

    my $buffer;

    open my $ifh, '<', $input_file;
    read $ifh, $buffer, -s $ifh;
    close $ifh;

    open my $ofh, '>', $output_file;
    print{$ofh} $buffer;
    close $ofh;
}