"Just give me the data". Where there's a requirement to take data from another program into a Perl or PHP script, it's often easier simply to take the data in a format that it's offered / exported from that other program and use code in Perl or PHP to make appropriate use of that data. The alternative of getting the data supplier to do all sorts of manipulation is, frankly, more trouble than it's worth.

Lisa has passed me a data flow - a dump of all the Melksham retail businesses - from the map she's been working on and is being shown at the West Wilts Show today. It's good, it contains what I need, but it's formatted with the map in mind rather than with the data meaning ("how it should look" rather than "what it means"). Now I could ask for it in XML ;-) ... of I could use Perl or PHP and their powerful text handlers. I have chose to do the latter.

Here is the main "what's this line" decision code - in PHP:

if (ereg("^ ",$record)) { # MAIN HEADER
elseif (count($els) == 1) { # SUB HEAD
elseif (count($els) == 2 and ereg("^[1-9]",$els[1])) { # OUT OF TOWN on map
elseif (count($els) == 2) { # OUT OF TOWN LOCATION not on map
elseif (count($els) == 3) { # IN TOWN LOCATION
else { # ERROR

and here is the formatted list of Melksham retailers I have produced from it. The source code is here. The next stage is going to be to produce listings by area ... as I have the data in my PHP code now, that will be easy. And I know that I need to put a good look and feel onto it!

You can download the map from here.
(written 2009-07-25)

 H104 - PHP - Control Statements
  [340] Code and code maintainance efficiency - (2005-06-08)
  [353] Wimbledon Neck - (2005-06-20)
  [406] Assignment, equality and identity in PHP - (2005-08-08)
  [421] Don't repeat code - use loops or functions - (2005-08-21)
  [657] The ternary operator in Python - (2006-03-25)
  [863] Double and Triple equals operator in PHP - (2006-09-12)
  [962] Breaking a loop - Ruby and other languages - (2006-12-03)
  [1191] Smart English Output - via PHP and Perl ? : operator - (2007-05-18)
  [1199] Testing for one of a list of values. - (2007-05-22)
  [1220] for loop - how it works (Perl, PHP, Java, C, etc) - (2007-06-06)
  [1477] Decisions - small ones, or big ones? - (2007-12-18)
  [1696] Saying NOT in Perl, PHP, Python, Lua ... - (2008-07-04)
  [1825] Question Mark - Colon operator (Perl and PHP) - (2008-10-08)
  [2912] Predictions for the seagull population - (2010-08-09)
  [3200] How a for loop works Java, Perl and other languages - (2011-03-12)
  [3397] Does a for loop evaluate its end condition once, or on every iteration? - (2011-08-18)
  [3895] Flowchart to program - learning to program with Well House - (2012-10-14)
  [3914] While, for, foreach or something else to loop. - (2012-11-06)
  [4322] Learning to Program - the conditional statement (if) - (2014-11-21)
  [4323] Learning to program - Loop statements such as while - (2014-11-22)

Back to Turning potential customers away

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Forward to Hot Tap at West Wilts Show

A new place in pictures
Breakfast in Mexico
Melksham to Mexico for the week
Hot Tap at West Wilts Show
Extracting real data from an exported file in PHP or Perl
Turning potential customers away
See us at the West Wilts Show
Mistaken identity?
What does x on a linux directory mean?
How much space does my directory take - Linux