Getting at the bits

One place that Perl scores very highly is reading complex file formats. A really useful built-in function for this purpose is split(). This takes a divider and a string, whose length is only limited by Perl's string handling limit. The divider is in the form of a regular expression, so it can be as complicated as you wish. Split() returns an array, with each piece of the original string as an element, broken up according to the regex and the divider(s) removed. Say, for example, you wrote ...

@Result = split(/:/, "apples:oranges:pears"

then @Result would contain the elements

apples
oranges
pears

with the dividing ':' discarded. The following, real life, example is for extracting the required item from a comma-delimited list, such as a line in a CSV file...

sub GetCsvElement
{
my @V_ARRAY;
my $P_ELEMENT = $_[0];
my $P_SOURCE_STRING = $_[1];
my $V_RESULT;

# -----------------------------------
# Drop the elements into our array...
# -----------------------------------
@V_ARRAY = split (/,/, $P_SOURCE_STRING);

# ----------------------------------------------------------------
# Arrays are zero based so we pick one less than the passed value!
# ----------------------------------------------------------------
$V_RESULT = trim $V_ARRAY[--$P_ELEMENT];

# ----------------------------
# Return the requested item...
# ----------------------------
return $V_RESULT;
}

Remember, because you're using a regular expression to define the delimiter, you can process multiple types of line or even lines with more than one delimiter.
: