Delimited Text Database Help

once you have opened a file try

while(<FILE>){
#for each line of the file perform an action
@fields = split(/\t/, $_); #where the file is a tab deliminated

# other opertaions on file contents here

}

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my $file = 'file.txt';
open FILE, $file or die "Can not open $file $!\n";

while (<FILE>) {
  my $foo = substr($_,15,9);
  print "F $foo\n";
}

To move your data from text files to a database, you'll want to acquire the data from each of the files.  To do this, you should use the glob() function to get a list of files in the directory.

Next, you'll want to select a database system.  MySQL is a commonly used database, free for non-commercial use, and an excellent choice for a wide variety of needs.  To interface this with Perl, you can use the DBI module.  Documentation is available here: http://search.cpan.org/~timb/DBI-1.43/DBI.pm

Like Tintin said above, you can use substr() to perform the same operation as the UNIX cut command.  To add the data to a database, use code similar to the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use DBI; #use the DBI module
my $dsn = "DBI:mysql:database=db_directconnect;host=localhost;port=$portnumber";
my $dbh = DBI->connect($dsn, 'username', 'passwd'); #connect to the database

my $file = 'file.txt';
open (FILE, $file) or die "Can not open $file $!\n";
while (<FILE>) {
  my $foo = substr($_,15,9); #get the data from the file
  $dbh->do("insert into tbl_tablename (column_name) values ('$foo')"); #execute a SQL command
}
$dbh->disconnect(); #disconnect from the database

Hope this helps.

Thanks everybody.

Tom, that is an excellent answer.

I really appreciate the help.

Cleavis