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Date:      Mon, 26 Apr 2004 14:01:46 -0400 (EDT)
From:      "Aaron Peterson" <aaron@alpete.com>
To:        "Drew Tomlinson" <drew@mykitchentable.net>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Perl Help For Newbie
Message-ID:  <4914.206.114.147.90.1083002506.squirrel@mail.alpete.com>
In-Reply-To: <408D435A.70506@mykitchentable.net>
References:  <408D3DD7.1050607@mykitchentable.net> <58959.204.118.78.206.1082999243.squirrel@mail.alpete.com> <408D435A.70506@mykitchentable.net>

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> On 4/26/2004 10:07 AM Aaron Peterson wrote:
>
>>>Any guidance as to the best way to approach this task would be most
>>>appreciated.  I've
>>>done lots of reading but haven't found anything that teaches me how to
>>>"think" about
>>>building this script.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>probably the best way to approach this is writing a script to generate
>> the
>>complete html in multiple formats instead of writing a script to search
>>through html to find values, calculate, and replace.  what i mean, is if
>>you had a single file with the US dollar values for everything, then you
>>wrote a script that used those values to generate complete html pages
>>(doing whatever conversions you needed in the process), that would
>>probably be easier than searching through pre-existing html and doing
>>substitution via regex.  then in the future you would only have to change
>>prices in one place and re-run the script, or change the conversion
>>algorithm and rerun the script to get all new html pages.  (html, xml and
>>other markup is notoriosly difficult to regex)
>>
>>
> This makes sense but how would I keep the files "in sync".  I mean how
> would I be sure that $xx.xx amount corresponded to y product?  Would it
> just "work" because each entry in the description array would have a
> corresponding entry in the price array?  My fear is getting off by one
> and then having every entry after that be incorrect.  Is this a big risk?
>
> Thanks for your reply.  I know I have a lot to learn.

I'm saying with a text data file like the following (data.txt):

Item Number One:3.50
Item Number Two:2.25
Item Number Three:300
Item Number Four:25.75

You might write a script something like this (example.pl) to generate HTML:

#!/usr/bin/perl

open(DATA, "<", "data.txt") or die "Couldn't open data file\n";
@data = <DATA>;
close(DATA);

open(HTML, ">", "output.html");

print HTML qq|
<html>
<head>
<title>Example HTML Output</title>
</head>
<body>
<table>
|;

foreach (@data) {
        chomp(($description,$dollars) = split /:/);
        $converted_value = $dollars * 1.13;
        print HTML qq|<tr>
        <td>$description</td>
        <td>\$$dollars</td>
        <td>\$$converted_value</td>
</tr>
|;
}

print HTML "</table></body></html>";

close(HTML);

Hope that helps give you ideas.
aaron



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