Problem
During my first encounters with Perl many years ago, I asked how can I get a specific column.
It was so easy in AWK! ๐
Solution
Well here it is in Perl – see example tab.
BTW you can always write an awkscript and run it through a2p – very good for learning Perl! ๐
Example
Show column 1:
perl -ane 'print $F[0]."n";'
Show column 2:
perl -ane 'print $F[1]."n";'
Show last column:
perl -ane 'print $F[$#F]."n";'
Show last but one column:
perl -ane 'print $F[($#F-1)]."n";'
So you just run your program, or cat your file, etc and pipe it through this code to get specific column.
Reference
[tags]Perl column handling, Awk to Perl, a2p, Perl Coding School[/tags]
Use split:
my @columns = split /t/, $input;
my $third_column = $columns[2];
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