Date: 2 Oct 2001 02:23:04 GMT
From: damian@qimr.edu.au (Damian James)
Subject: Re: Using TAB - Newbie Question
Message-Id: <slrn9ri936.6ni.damian@puma.qimr.edu.au>

On 1 Oct 2001 17:43:31 -0700, Daniel Riveong said:
>...
>I am creating a flat database with data from a submitted form. My
>Question is how does one use TAB is a delimiter?

A tab is represented by \t. 

>
>Here is a sample of the code:
>
>   foreach $to_print (@sortlist) {
>      if ($fields{'outputfile'} ne "")
>       { print OUT_FILE "$fields{$to_print}\|"; }
>      if ($fields{'submit_to'} ne "")
>       { $msgtext .= "$to_print = $fields{$to_print}\n"; }
>   }

Do you really want all records on the same line, with a trailing
delimiter? Remember that anything other than '', 0 and undefined will
evaluate as true. Also, you can test for the existence of hash keys
with exists(). See `perldoc -f exists` and `perldoc -f defined`.

You are specifically testing for the empty string in both
conditionals. You *probably* don't need to do that.

Since $fields{'submit_to'} and $fields{'outputfile'} are not going to
change, and you probably don't want to be testing them for every
element in @sortlist, the above could be rewritten to eliminate the
foreach loop:

[warning: untested]

    print OUT_FILE join("\t", @fields{@sortlist})
        if $fields{'outputfile'};
    $msgtext = join('', map("$_ = $fields{$_}\n", @sortlist))
        if $fields{'submit_to'};

You might want to have a look at the perldata man page to find out
about hash slices. See also, `perldoc -f map` and `perldoc -f join`.

HTH

Cheers,
Damian
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