Re: OT: a problem about text manipulation

[Benjamin Franz]

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Benjamin Franz wrote:
> the following Perl script should do it.
>
> #!/usr/bin/perl
>
> use strict;
> use warnings;
>
> while (<ARGV>) {
>     chomp;
>     my @elements = split(/\s+/);
>     my $running_col1;
>     foreach my $item (@elements) {
>         if ($item =~ m/^[0-9]+$/) {
>             $running_col1 = $item;
>         } else {
>             print "$running_col1 $item\n";
>         }
>     }
> }

Here is a slightly revised version that would handle the case if a line 
break occured in the middle of a 'set'. IOW it would handle the case of

1   a   b   c
d   e   2   a   a
3   e   w   a

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $running_col1;
while (<ARGV>) {
    chomp;
    my @elements = split(/\s+/);
    foreach my $item (@elements) {
        if ($item =~ m/^[0-9]+$/) {
            $running_col1 = $item;
        } else {
            print "$running_col1 $item\n";
        }
    }
}