[nycbug-talk] Text parsing question

[James E Keenan]

On Dec 31, 2008, at 12:10 PM, maddaemon at gmail.com wrote:

>
> Since I don't know Perl (yet), I showed that to my boss, who then
> modified it,

Why?  In what way did it not solve your problem?

I ask this not out of wounded vanity, but because further diagnosis  
is difficult without knowing in what way my suggestion was inadequate.

Note:  Your original post presented very little data, so I had to  
make up sample data in order to illustrate an approach toward a  
solution.


> but his Perl has some rust on it, and it winds up puking
> a lot.  Can anyone show me what should be fixed so I can get this
> working and off my plate?

As you note farther on, you are probably better off taking this  
question to a Perl list.  I would suggest perlmonks.org.  But  
whatever list you go to, the first feedback you get will be something  
like this:

"You are using 'use strict;' and 'use warnings;' at the top of your  
program.  That's good, because they show you where your code is  
either suboptimal or simply wrong.  (perl -c yourscript)  But once  
those statements show you your errors, it's up to you to correct  
them.  Start with the first error reported and proceed from there."


> Much thanks..
>
> Oh, and what would need to change so I could pull the data from a file
> rather than appending the data to the bottom of the script?

perldoc -f open

> I realize
> that this isn't the proper forum for this question

See above.

>
> __DATA__
> Dec 30 09:34:53 user1234 (tried logging in from 192.168.32.100)
> Dec 30 09:34:53 user1234 (tried logging in from 192.168.32.7)
> Dec 30 14:38:37 user5678 (tried logging in from 192.168.32.100)
> Dec 30 14:38:37 user5678 (tried logging in from 192.168.32.8)
> Dec 30 14:38:44 user5678 (tried logging in from 192.168.32.100)
> Dec 30 14:38:44 user5678 (tried logging in from 192.168.32.8)

The data you present here differs from what you originally presented  
and from the dummy data I made up in that there is no 'wordspace- 
hyphen-wordspace' between the datestamp and the username.  So you  
would have to modify the regular expression I wrote to reflect this  
difference.

Jim Keenan