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work on ods spreadsheet with perl in ubuntu

The included file lists burial information for a nearby cemetery where my sister is the secretary. fyi: interment means burial. She has interment books that are old. I am trying to put the information in electronic form because the books are wearing out and the information should not be lost.

I would like to run a program (in perl I suppose -- linux for sure), that divides the included file into seperate files for each year of interment. The earliest file, "1939 new alexandria cemetery.ods", would look like:
PERMIT No.      PRIMARY DISTRICT No.      DATE OF INTERMENT      NAME OF DECEASED      CAUSE OF DEATH      PLACE OF DEATH      UNDERTAKER      ADDRESS
22      662      1939-12-20      Mary Elizabeth Burge      natural cause      Brilliant      J. A. Rigley      Smithfield
28      8280      1939-12-30      Milton Eugene Reddine      cerebral hemmorage      Mingo Junction      A. G. Murphy      Mingo Junction
23      662      1939-12-30      Margaret Jane Davis      advanced age      Brilliant      J. C. McClave      Steubenville, OH
617      654      1939-12-30      Daniel Mathues      cancer      Steubenville, OH      J. C. McClave      Steubenville, OH
new-alexandria-cemetery.ods

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noci

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dwcronin

ASKER

noci,
I have trouble running your code. Here is the csv file I'm tryin to work on:

noci

The code is bash shell code.
Not perl. i was in a hurry this morning...

Your csv (saved .ods as .CSV, with , as separator, & " as string delimiter.) is now attached.
I slightly modified the script to end with the current year (starting from 1939 still)
(attached )
new-alexandria-cemetery.csv
cemetery-by-year.sh

FishMonger

Here's a perl script with error handling (which could be increased or left out if you choose).

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;

my $csv_file = 'new-alexandria-cemetery.csv';
open my $fh, '<', $csv_file or die "failed to open '$csv_file' <$!>";

my %interment;
my $header = <$fh>;
while (<$fh>) {
    my ($year) = (split /,/)[2] =~ /^(\d+)/;
    push @{ $interment{$year} }, $_;
}
close $fh;

foreach my $year (sort keys %interment) {
    my $file = "${year}_intement.csv";
    open my $fh, '>', $file or die "failed to open '$file' <$!>";
    print $fh $header, @{ $interment{$year} };
    close $fh;
}

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UPDATE:
I should mention that there are perl modules available to both read and write speadsheet files which allows you to bypass the export/import of csv files. The modules also have the advantage of being able to format the cells as well as applying other normal spreadsheet features, which can't be done via a csv file. The drawback is that the syntax is a lot more involved than dealing with csv files.