I like the simple option 1) because supposedly my script asked for the atributes in a given order and knows to receive them in that order.
As Clay hints to, the prefered seperator might not be obvious. Why not have that be a command line option like AWKs -F. A good default would be TAB.
The parsing now is simple READ.
The basic Perl parsing now is a very simple:
@val=split /\t/, `$command`
or with no spaces in the values:
$_ = `$command`;
@val=split;
If this is an option which generates multiple, popular, attributes (like ps -ef) then a header line is needed. This could be implied by such multi-attribute selection.
You then just pre-parse the attributes and turn them into string/keyed indexes. In Perl:
$_=<>;
@attrs=split;
$i=0;
$attr{$a}=$i++ while($attrs[$i]};
$_=<>;
@val=split;
print $val[$attr{"attr2"}]."\n"
or
@attrs=split /\t/,<>;
for ($i=0;$i<@attrs;$i++) {$attr{$attrs[$i]}=$i};
@val=split /\t/,<>;
print $val[$attr{"attr2"}]."\n"
btw... I noticed one minor catch with a TAB versus the simple perl whitespace split. With an explicit split on TAB the potential newline after the last field become part of the field, so needs to be 'chomped' first:
$_=<>;
chomp;
@attrs=split /\t/;
I suppose a generic solution would be an attribute/value format string with recognized words for attribute and value:
-F "
:\n"
-F "=:"
-F "\t"
nah!
fwiw,
Hein.
