How to get the 3rd argument

[iamvela]

I have a file of several hundred lines with text. A few sample lines are

1871:1 0.00% http://example.org/filepath1
1872:1 0.00% http://example.org/filepath2
1873:1 0.00% http://example.org/filepath3
1877:1 0.00% http://example.org/filepath4
...etc

How can I extract the 3rd argument (the URL)

Thx!

[edited by: tedster at 6:55 am (utc) on July 12, 2008]
[edit reason] remove specific urls [/edit]

[rocknbil]

Welcome aboard iamvela, see TOS [webmasterworld.com] for the edit that is to come. :-)

Something like this should do it:

#!/usr/bin/perl 
# open the file 
open (FILE,"yourfile.txt") or die("Cannot open file for reading $!"); 
 # chomp newline, read line by line 
 while (chomp($line = <FILE>)) { 
 # split line on spaces 
 ($id,$percent,$url) = split(/\s/,$line); 
 # You could do a number of things here, let's do two: 
 # print the variables and store URL's in an array (hash) 
 print "ID: $id PERCENT: $percent URL: $url\n"; 
 $urls{$id} = $url; 
 } 
#close file 
close(FILE); 
#print out contents of list 
foreach $v (sort keys %urls) { 
 print "key: $v value: $urls{$v}\n"; 
} 

[perl_diver]

if the first two fields are always fixed-length:

2020:1 0.00%

You can use unpack() to extract the URLs, it is way more efficient than using split or other regexp. See the pack/unpack functions for details, or the pack/unpack tutorial that comes with perl.

If they are not fixed-length, use split() as shown by rocknbil.

[iamvela]

Thanks, I got a simple solution that I am posting for others' & posterity:

% cat <file-name> ¦awk '{print $3}'

[perl_diver]

and its not even perl.