\n I’ve been working on a solution that takes uploaded CSV files and parses them to process the data (in my case ultimately it will live in a database) Here is some sample code that I put together in my sand-box that takes care of parsing the data in to an array. DISCLAIMER This is not a newbie tutorial. If you don’t already understand perl and oo programming, you might be a little bit lost. This solution requires the Text::CSV module from CPAN (Right here)

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Sandbox application for testing perl script CSV parse

use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::CSV

my $csv = Text::CSV->new();

open (CSV, ") {
                next if ($. == 1); 
                if ($csv->parse($_)) {
                    my @columns = $csv->fields();
                    print "tBusiness Name: $columns[0]ntContact: $columns[1]ntMessage: $columns[11]nn";
                    print "t----------------------------nn";
            } else {
                    my $err = $csv->error_input;
                    print "Failed to parse line: $err";
            }



    }

    close CSV;
    exit;

Okay, lets break this down a bit. The first thing that we do (after loading all the mods) is to create a new csv object.

my $csv = Text::CSV->new();

Then the while() line iterates through the file.

This code pareses and displays the data:

if ($csv->parse($_)) {
        my @columns = $csv->fields();
        print "tBusiness Name: $columns[0]ntContact: $columns[1]ntMessage: $columns[11]nn";
        print "t----------------------------nn";

The thing that you need to keep in mind for later is that all the data is stored in an array called @columns. We can access the data by specifying which array item to use. Like most languages, we use [n] to tell which item to use.

Next time I will write about how you can take this parsed data and insert it into a database.