If you are playing with Unicode, you’re probably going to want to convert to the various normalization forms. There are some programs to do this in the Unicode::Tussle distribution, but you can also create some one-liners to do this as well (Item 120. Use Perl one-liners to create mini programs). Continue reading “Some special Unicode shell aliases to normalize strings”
Category: midweek bonus item
Find dates with Regexp::Common
[This is a mid-week bonus item]
Suppose you want to find some dates inside a big string. The problem with dates is that there are some many ways to write them, and even if you can come up with a pattern to get the structure right, can you handle the different locales and languages that use different words to refer to the same day or month? Continue reading “Find dates with Regexp::Common”
Use Regexp::Common to find locale-specific dates
[This is a mid-week bonus item, and it’s a bit of a departure from much of what you have already seen on this blog. This is just some code that I had to write this week and I thought you’d like to see it.]
I had to find some dates inside a big string, and the problem with dates is that there are some many ways to write them, and even if I get the format right, some of the machines might use another locale. My string comes from an ls I run as a remote command, which might show the date in one of two formats. The files changed in the last six months replaces the year with the time: Continue reading “Use Regexp::Common to find locale-specific dates”
Perl 5.14 adds non-destructive transliteration
[This is a mid-week bonus item since it’s so short]
In Perl 5.13.2, you got a non-destructive version of the substitution operator (Use the /r substitution flag to work on a copy). Instead of changing it’s target, the non-destructive version returns a new string that has the substitution. Continue reading “Perl 5.14 adds non-destructive transliteration”
Force install a module to reinstall it
[This is a midweek bonus Item since it is so short]
I recently bought the new MacBook Air, which means my solid state device has over four times the storage as my old MacBook Air. For the first time, I used Apple’s migration tool to transfer everything from the old one to the new one. It even transferred my perl installations, and I thought that would be fine. It mostly is, except for some compiled modules that cause strange, new errors. Programs don’t load correctly, modules don’t compile, and things go horribly wrong when running test suites. Continue reading “Force install a module to reinstall it”
Use the return value from srand
[This is another bonus, mid-week item since it’s so short and probably mostly useless as a tweak to what you already do.]
Perl 5.14 changes srand to return the seed that it used to start the pseudorandom number generator that gives you numbers through rand. There are plenty of interwebs that will explain the difference between real randomness and the sort that you get from computers, but for this item, suffice it to say that the numbers you get from perl are completely deterministic. If you start with the same seed, you get the same sequence. Continue reading “Use the return value from srand”
Set default values with the defined-or operator.
[This is a mid-week bonus Item since it’s so short]
Prior to Perl 5.10, you had to be a bit careful checking a Perl variable before you set a default value. An uninitialized value and a defined but false value both acted the same in the logical || short-circuit operator. The Perl idiom to set a default value looks like this: Continue reading “Set default values with the defined-or operator.”