Perl script to print out cars model and car color

Answer 1

open IN, "< somefile";
while (<IN>) {
  chomp;
  if (m/,/) {
    @temp = split /,/, $_;
    printf "Car model: %s\nColor: %s\nYear: %s\nCity: %s\n\n", $make, @temp;
  } else {
    $make = $_;
  }  
}

Answer 2

I would go through the file line by line and for each line (pseudo-code, not tested) :

if ($line ~= /\w+,\d+,\w+/) { # matches the lines with the information
    my $array = split $line at , 
    print to file array[0] + "," + array[1] + "," + array[2] + "\n"
} elsif ($line ~= /\w+/) { # matches the car model since the information was already matched
    print "Car Model:" + $line + "\n"
} else {   # must be the whitespace so you know the information about the car is done
    print "\n" # to separate the car information
}

If you don't have the blank line in your csv file then do the newline to separate the car models elsewhere

Answer 3

open my $fh, '<', 'filename' or die $!;

while (<$fh>) {
    next if /^\s*$/;
    my @fields = split /,/, $_;
    print("Car Model: $fields[0]\n"), next if @fields == 1;

    my %data;
    @data{qw( color year city )} = @fields;
    print "Color:$data{color} Year:$data{year} City:$data{city}\n";
}

Answer 4

You can read in CSV files with Text::CSV. That module will catch all the edge cases that you are likely to miss in your own implementation.

Check out perldoc perldsc and perldoc perldata for help on perl data structures.