Should we hire someone who writes C in Perl? [closed]

Answer 1

Just the initial block indicates that he has missed the fundamentals about Perl.

    while ($line ne "") {
    # Skip spaces and start with empty field.

    if (substr ($line,0,1) eq " ") {
        $line = substr ($line,1);
        next;
    }

That should at least be written using a regular expression to remove leading white space. I like the answer from jrockway best, modules rock. Though I would have used regular expressions to do it, something like.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# $Id$
#

use strict;

open(FD, "< qq.in") || die "Failed to open file.";
while (my $line = ) {
    # Don't like chomp.
    $line =~ s/(\r|\n)//g;
    # ".*?[^\\\\]"  = Match everything between quotations that doesn't end with
    # an escaped quotation, match lazy so we will match the shortest possible.
    # [^",]*?       = Match strings that doesn't have any quotations.
    # If we combine the two above we can match strings that contains quotations
    # anywhere in the string (or doesn't contain quotations at all).
    # Put them together and match lazy again so we can match white-spaces
    # and don't include them in the result.
    my $match_field = '\s*((".*?[^\\\\]"|[^",]*?)*)\s*';
    if (not $line =~ /^$match_field,$match_field,$match_field,$match_field$/) {
        die "Invalid line: $line";
    }
    # Put values in nice variables so we don't have to deal with cryptic $N
    # (and can use $1 in replace).
    my ($user_id, $name, $level, $numeric_id) = ($1, $3, $5, $7);
    print "$line\n";
    for my $field ($user_id, $name, $level, $numeric_id) {
        # If the field starts with a quotation,
        # strip everything after the first unescaped quotation.
        $field =~ s/^"(.*?[^\\\\])".*/$1/g;
        # Now fix all escaped variables (not only quotations).
        $field =~ s/\\(.)/$1/g;
        print "   [$field]\n";
    }
}
close FD;