Parsing data - how to find word position

...and then return a column of data

[MichaelBluejay]

I'm trying to return a specific column of data based on the user's input. I figured out a way to do it but it seems rather awkward and inefficient. Is there a better way?

$data = q[ 
smith blue apple cat  
jones red grape dog 
clark green banana mouse 
 ]; 
  
$input = 'Fruit'; 
@headings= qw(Name Color Fruit Animal); 
$counter=0; 
for $item (@headings) { 
 if ("$item " eq "$input ") { $whichColumn=$counter; last;} 
 $counter++; 
} 
  
@data = split("\n",$data); 
for $item (@data) { 
 @columns = split (' ',$item); 
 print "$columns[$whichColumn]<p>"; 
} 

[perl_diver]

is there any reason why you aren't using a hash?

[bennymack]

Try using List::MoreUtils::firstidx. It's not a standard module so you may have to install it. Once that's take care of you'd use it like:

<untested>

use List::MoreUtils qw[firstidx];
$data = q[ 
smith blue apple cat 
jones red grape dog 
clark green banana mouse 
];
 
$input = 'Fruit'; 
@headings= qw(Name Color Fruit Animal); 
$whichColumn = firstidx{$_ eq $input}@headings;
 
@data = split("\n",$data); 
for $item (@data) { 
 @columns = split (' ',$item); 
 print "$columns[$whichColumn]<p>"; 
} 

</untested>

[perl_diver]

another way:

my $data = q[  
smith blue apple cat  
jones red grape dog  
clark green banana mouse  
 ]; 
# remove leading and trailing spaces in lines 
$data =~ s/^\s+//gm; 
$data =~ s/\s+$//gm; 
my $input = 'Fruit';  
my @headings= qw(Name Color Fruit Animal);  
for my $i (0..$#headings) {  
  next if ($headings[$i] ne $input); 
  print map {(split(/\s+/))[$i]."\n"} 
   map {split(/\n/)} $data; 
  last; 
} 

[MichaelBluejay]

Thanks for the help.

As for why I wouldn't use a hash, the real table has 166 columns and 100 rows. And there are about a dozen different tables. I want to be able to just dump these space-delimited tables into my code, without having to write yet more code to extract the columns, in order to have code that prints the columns based on the user's input.

Anyway, from your examples it looks like I wasn't too far off the mark -- Perl just doesn't seem to have a super-efficient way to refer to the Nth word of a line. I guess I'm spoiled by Xtalk, where you can write code like "put word 5 of line 3 of theVar into word 2 of line 6 of someOthervar".

[perl_diver]

perl runs through arrays very fast so your way or my way or the way bennymack suggested are probably all pretty efficient. XTalk might be able to use a seemingly simple line of code to do what you want but behind the scenes it's probably doing something similar to what perl is doing: looping through the data to get what it needs. Although I could be wrong since I don't know anything about XTalk. But really, your code was pretty good to begin with.