Perl Help For Newbie

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 4/26/2004 11:01 AM Aaron Peterson wrote:

>>On 4/26/2004 10:07 AM Aaron Peterson wrote:
>>
>>    
>>
>>>>Any guidance as to the best way to approach this task would be most
>>>>appreciated.  I've
>>>>done lots of reading but haven't found anything that teaches me how to
>>>>"think" about
>>>>building this script.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>        
>>>>
>>>probably the best way to approach this is writing a script to generate
>>>the
>>>complete html in multiple formats instead of writing a script to search
>>>through html to find values, calculate, and replace.  what i mean, is if
>>>you had a single file with the US dollar values for everything, then you
>>>wrote a script that used those values to generate complete html pages
>>>(doing whatever conversions you needed in the process), that would
>>>probably be easier than searching through pre-existing html and doing
>>>substitution via regex.  then in the future you would only have to change
>>>prices in one place and re-run the script, or change the conversion
>>>algorithm and rerun the script to get all new html pages.  (html, xml and
>>>other markup is notoriosly difficult to regex)
>>>
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>This makes sense but how would I keep the files "in sync".  I mean how
>>would I be sure that $xx.xx amount corresponded to y product?  Would it
>>just "work" because each entry in the description array would have a
>>corresponding entry in the price array?  My fear is getting off by one
>>and then having every entry after that be incorrect.  Is this a big risk?
>>
>>Thanks for your reply.  I know I have a lot to learn.
>>    
>>
>
>I'm saying with a text data file like the following (data.txt):
>
>Item Number One:3.50
>Item Number Two:2.25
>Item Number Three:300
>Item Number Four:25.75
>  
>
I understand.  However, because my source file is already an HTML doc, I 
would have to some how extract the relevant parts into the data file you 
describe.  Would this still be the preferred way to do it?

<snip>

>Hope that helps give you ideas.
>  
>
Yes.  I appreciate your time.

Thanks,

Drew