Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with perl

Too much music! I should have such a problem...

chez shoes — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:39:12 -0800

Perl script to manage enormous, and growing, music library? First things first - I am not a programmer by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have some SQL and Perl knowledge (more SQL, less Perl). And, I'm willing to learn more.

The problem: 1000's of MP3 files. Some are duplicates (and triplicates) from compilation albums, some have really bad metadata. What I'd like to do is run a script that will pull all the dupes into a file, so I can see how bad it is. Then, in the interest of saving space, I'd like to delete all redundancies. And further, I'd like to be able to manipulate the metadata - normalize such things as &/and, bulk-change misspellings, etc.

If a tried and true script to do this sort of thing exists, can you point me to it? Thanks in advance.

PERL before swine

bluejayway — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:23:53 -0800

PERL filter: I'm a PERL ignoramus and trying to run a script from Baseball Hacks to download a bunch of zipped files from retrosheet.org. I'm getting an error that says: URL must be absolute. I can't figure out how to make the url absolute, as each file's location is different and supplied by variable values. Any hints would be super appreciated. (Script is after the jump). Here's the script- copied directly from the book- I only modified the date ranges and changed the non-html-friendly characters for the purposes of posting here:
use FileHandle;

use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$baseurrl = "http://www.retrosheet.org/";

for ($year = 60; $year LESSTHAN= 92; $year++) {
foreach $league ("al", "nl") {
my $filename = '19' . $year . $league . '.zip';
my $url = $baseurl . '19' . $year . '/19' . $year . $league . '.zip';
my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET =GREATERTHAN $url);
my $res = $ua-GREATERTHANrequest($req);

print STDERR "fetching $filename\n";

if ($res-GREATERTHANis_success) {
my $fh = new FileHandle "GREATERTHAN$filename";
if (defined $fh) {
print $fh $res->content;
$fh-GREATERTHANclose;
} else {
print STDERR "could not open $filename: $!\n";
}
}
else {
print STDERR $res->status_line, "\n";
}
}
}

Batch convert Word docs to text files?

yarrow — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:29:40 -0800

Batch convert Word docs to text files? Does anyone know of a utility to convert a large number of Word documents (hundreds) to text files in Windows XP? They are in Word 2003 (.doc) format. The Word docs are about a 1MB each because they have images, but the text files they turn into are only about 4KB. I want to run a text processing script I wrote in perl on them, but I'm not sure how to get them in text format in the first place without opening each and converting it by hand. Looking for free solutions if possible, just because it's a pain for me to pay for software at work.

Help me learn Perl, Python, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby

jgunsch — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 09:39:29 -0800

Help me learn a few new programming languages. Python, Perl, Lisp, Haskell, Ruby. In college now, been programming for six or seven years already, all self-taught. I started with Java for a couple years, moved on and now consider myself fairly fluent in PHP and its friends (JavaScript, CSS, etc.). I've been having a lot of fun with jQuery lately! And now I'm stuck in a summer internship working on an ASP.NET project written in VB.

I'd love people's recommendations for books/resources to get started in a few high-level languages: Perl, Python, Lisp, and possibly Haskell or Ruby. I went through an O'Reilly book on Perl (I believe it was this one a couple months ago, so I have a handle on the syntax, but am not terribly capable with it.

Opinions/information on which languages people would recommend (or others) and for what purposes would be incredibly helpful. Other language suggestions are welcome, as well. I don't really have reasons to learn these specific languages beyond "well, I probably should know enough Python to know what it's good for, understand what's going on in Python code if I saw it, and hack something together for a basic task." I'm perfectly capable of searching for tutorials/books on my own, but people's personal recommendations have that knack of knowing which ones worked and didn't for them. ;)

Books/Internet resources/etc. that anyone could point me to would be awesome. Bonus points for a good crash course in Linux shell scripting.

Best language for highschool bioinformatics course?

bergeycm — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:22:31 -0800

I'm teaching a course on bioinformatic programming for high schoolers. Which language should I teach it in? And do you have any nifty ideas for easy projects that fall under the bioinformatics header? It's a six-week, twice-weekly internship for highschoolers with absolutely no programming experience. The catch is, it has to be a bioinformatics course. What language would be best? I think the two contenders are Perl and Python, though I'm open to other options.

Possible Perl Advantages:

- I know Perl, so I won't need to pick up another language and I'd be better at debugging it.
- If the kids go on to AP Comp Sci or a 101 course in college, the language is often Java. Both Perl and Java use C-style syntax.
- The bioinformatics online support for Perl seems better than for Python.
- Long-string manipulation and speed seem much better in Perl.
- Though complex Perl is scary-looking, well-writen basic perl doesn't seem that intimidating.

Possible Python Advantages:

- Less steep learning curve.
- Possibly more resources for beginner programmers.
- The whitespace-is-important thing and there-is-only-one-best-way-of-doing-something thing may be better for teaching good programming techniques.

Also, any basic bioinformatics projects you can think of are much appreciated. The goal is really to teach programming, but the internship requires that it be done through bioinformatic applications.

Shell script handling CSV columns

fightoplankton — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:30:20 -0800

I'm using a shell script to handle some excel docs by converting to csv and reformatting it a little bit. I'm having some difficulty going on with the next part of the script. Some help would be great. :) CURRENT SCRIPT:
#!/bin/sh
ls *.xls
echo "Enter filename for excel input file: "
read filen
xls2csv -x "$filen"".xls" -b WINDOWS-1252 -c "$filen"".csv" -a UTF-8
sed '1,3d' "$filen".csv >"$filen"_temp.csv
cut -d "," -f 1,4- "$filen"_temp.csv > "$filen"_temp2.csv
awk -F, '{sub($NF, "");print}' "$filen"_temp2.csv > "$filen"_temp3.csv
sed 's/.$//' "$filen"_temp3.csv > "$filen"_fixed.csv
rm "$filen".csv
rm "$filen"_temp.csv
rm "$filen"_temp2.csv
rm "$filen"_temp3.csv
echo "$filen"".xls corrected and saved as ""$filen""_fixed.csv"

EXAMPLE OUTPUT (first three lines only):
"Device ID","1) S31 Which best describes how you answered the online reading comprehension quiz?","2) S32 Which best describes how you answered the online timed retrieval quiz?","3) B19. If you want your product to be easy to find in the supermarket then you should make its container","4) C19. So that he can shift attention between the radio and his incessantly talking girl friend when she is in the car, Joe adjusts his radio","5) B20. Early selection is most likely to occur for","6) C20. Early selection for a red target is most likely to occur when there is","7) B21. In a lexical decision task, when the target is a bird name, e.g. robin, it is usually preceded by the prime BODY but is sometimes preceded by the prime BIRD.","8) C21. In a lexical decision task, when the target is a dog name, e.g. collie, it is usually preceded by the prime CAR but is sometimes preceded by the prime DOG.","9) B23. Suppose that that you see a brief display with 12 colored letters: 4 red, 4 white, and 4 blue. At the offset of the display you hear tone. A tone instructs you to report only the letters of a particular color: high for red, medium for white, and low for blue. About how many letters do you report?","10) B22. Sperling (1960) found that partial report produced the highest estimate of the number of available letters when the tone occurred ","11) C23. According to the logic of Sperling’s (1960) partial report method, an observer who reports three letters from a row in a 4 x 4 display that was cued at the display’s offset must have seen at least","12) C22. Sperling (1960) found that the greatest difference between full and partial report in the number available of letters was when the tone occurred ____ milliseconds after the offset of the visual display"
96A39,6,4,"4 c","4 c","5 c","5 c","5 c","4 i","3 c","1 c","1 i","5 i"
1E90A4,5,3,"4 c","4 c","5 c","5 c","2 i","5 c","3 c","1 c","4 i","4 i"

First, I need to remove the numbering of the questions from the first line. So "1) S31 Which best describes how you answered the online reading comprehension quiz?" would become "S31 Which best describes how you answered the online reading comprehension quiz?"

Next I need to remove an entire column if its row header doesn't begin with either B or C or is the "Device ID" column. For example, column starting with B19 is kept, the C23 is kept, and"Device ID" column is kept. The column with the question starting S31 must be entirely removed.

Thanks.

DWIM means do what I mean, dammit!

Ritchie — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 22:00:02 -0800

Perlfilter: I'm having problems iterating over and testing for keys within a hash of hashes. Example code (apologies for the poor layout):

use strict;



my %h = ( apples  => {

                        grannysmith => 5,

                        reddelicious => 3

                     },

          oranges => 2,

          pears   => 3 );



print "$_\n" for keys %h;



# problem 1

print "$_\n" for keys %{%h->{apples}}; # Warning: Using a hash as a reference is deprecated.



# workaround

my $h_ref = \%h;

print "$_\n" for keys %{$h_ref->{apples}};



# problem 2

for my $fruit ( keys %{$h_ref->{apples}} ) {

    if ( exists $fruit->{reddelicious} ) {  # Error: Can't use string ("grannysmith") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at test.pl line xx

        print "Found red delicious key\n";

    }

}

The code flagged as problem 1 returns
grannysmith
reddelicious

but with a warning: "Using a hash as a reference is deprecated." What would the undeprecated form be? I can make it work without the warning using the code flagged with workaround, but I don't see why I should have to create an extra reference if I can avoid it.

The code at problem 2 produces a flat-out error: "Can't use string ("grannysmith") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at test.pl line xx". What it should do (what I want it to do) is print "Found red delicious key". What am I doing wrong?

Joining MP3 Files Together Based on Date in Filename?

WCityMike — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:08:55 -0800

I have a podcast that downloads as multiple segments over multiple days. Its format arrives as YYYYMMDD_showcode_segment.mp3; so, for example, one download might result in files as 20090323_goofa_01.mp3 through 20090323_goofa_21.mp3, and also within the same download 20090324_goofa_01.mp3 through 20090324_goofa_21.mp3. What I'm looking for is a Unix script (shell, perl, what have you) that would look at a directory and look at what dates are represented there, and let me join all of the segments together by day. I can use mpgtx -j to do the actual joining; I'm looking for the code that would let the script determine what dates are in the directory and then get each day's segments united into a single MP3 for that day's show.

Any perl gurus up to fix a bug in Warrick?

Lord_Pall — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:01:51 -0800

For the good of the Underdogs, does anyone know how to fix a bug in Warrick? First of all I asked the guy who wrote it, and he's unable to help. I'm not a Perl guru, so this is a bit out of my league, so I turn to the community...

I'm using warrick for a rebuild of HOTU. I've gotten a 2,000 URL's back over the past 4 days, with around 14,000 left.

There seems to be a bug with Warrick's retrieval of Yahoo's cached pages, which is a shame because the yahoo cache seems to be the most complete.

The error seems to be because there's an interstitial warning page before any cached results. This throws off the cache recovery and kicks out an error.

Does anyone know how to fix this, hack or otherwise? Like assume that every cached yahoo page needs to be clicked through to avoid the problem?

Example of the warning page

Text of the error in Warrick.
!! The yahoo repo has a cached url for [http://www.the-underdogs.info/game.php?id=1923] -> [http://uk.wrs.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0WTecw1XJ5J1SQBSuTdmMwF;_ylu=X3oDMTByNXFlNTgyBGNvbG8DZQRwb3MDMTg1BHNlYwNzcgR2dGlkAw--/SIG=18ovkfijd/EXP=1235201461/**http%3A//74.6.239.67/search/cache%3Fei=UTF-8%26appid=warrick-app-id%26format=any%26similar_ok=1%26query=site%253Awww.the-underdogs.info%26adult_ok=0%26results=100%26start=101%26u=www.the-underdogs.info/game.php%253Fid%253D1923%26d=QYDtiQ-YSQLR%26icp=1%26.intl=us]
Request generated an error (410) for [http://uk.wrs.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0WTecw1XJ5J1SQBSuTdmMwF;_ylu=X3oDMTByNXFlNTgyBGNvbG8DZQRwb3MDMTg1BHNlYwNzcgR2dGlkAw--/SIG=18ovkfijd/EXP=1235201461/**http%3A//74.6.239.67/search/cache%3Fei=UTF-8%26appid=warrick-app-id%26format=any%26similar_ok=1%26query=site%253Awww.the-underdogs.info%26adult_ok=0%26results=100%26start=101%26u=www.the-underdogs.info/game.php%253Fid%253D1923%26d=QYDtiQ-YSQLR%26icp=1%26.intl=us] on try 1 of 5.
Sleeping for 5 minutes before trying again...

I can provide more information, partial recoveries, etcetera if it's needed...

Help me avoid coding a lame webpage!

perrce — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 17:07:18 -0800

I need a simple cgi-bin script that implements a scoreboard or counter for multiple teams. So a buddy of mine wants a simple web page that allows a handful of users to log in, view the scores of other teams, and increment or set their own score. For example, if you logged in as John, you might see something resembling:



Tim: 12

Pete: 9

John: 13 + -

Luke: 10

The + and - above would be buttons that John could use to increment his score (or maybe it's a text box with a submit button). Basically, he's looking for something really simple (a simple Perl cgi-bin script would be fine), and security is basically a non-issue.

This is something I could probably put together in perl in a couple hours, but the script he needs is state-of-the-art circa 1997, and there's really nothing that interests me beyond the fact that a friend's requested it. Besides, this has got to have been implemented before and I'd rather reuse than rewrite. I did some Google searches, but came up empty. Anyone have any suggestions for something that will work out of the box, or something close that I can modify?

Learning about firewalls and general computing

dicetumbler — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 09:09:46 -0800

I allowed perl access past my firewall (Am I even saying that right?). Should I be worried? And how do I learn more about the subject so I'm not so clueless in the future? I got a popup message on my Macbook about allowing perl access past my firewall (I think). I was downloading and installing Gnucash through Macports at the time, and I figured, must have something to do with the perl program that fetches finance quotes and prices, and I clicked "Allow." Immediately after I wondered if I'd made a mistake, and so I went to the firewall log and saw this:

Jan 8 00:27:40 ***** Firewall[39]: perl is listening from 0.0.0.0:62703 uid = 0 proto=6

(Computer name ***ed out.) I shouldn't be worried, should I?

And now that I'm on the subject, I feel like I need to know more about the basics of computer technology. I get the suspicion that to many people, my above question must sound like one of those questions you come across on lists of ridiculous tech support questions, like where the "any key" is or whether the program "Linux" is supported on XP.

I know perl is a program that people use (usually for network communications? right? right?) and that the 0.0.0.0 ip address probably tells someone who knows better that I have nothing to worry about. (Uh ... right?)

I'm not totally computer-illiterate, and I'm not particularly timid when it comes to messing around (for better or for worse). I've run Ubuntu in the past, and I spent a few days getting wireless to work with my old USB wirless adaptor using ndiswrapper, to give you some background. But ask me what a "driver" is and I couldn't really tell you the details, beyond the fact the fact that you need it to make hardware work. Same with "firewall," "ip address," "perl," "ssh," and so forth.

Like they say, teach a man to fish and you feed him for life. I want to learn more about the fundamentals of networking security and computing in general. But how do I go about it? Where do I even start? The superficial approach has got me so far, and at the same time I'm assuming that learning assembly language won't really help me here.

Yet Another File Manager Question

larsks — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 17:07:36 -0800

Help me find an online file manager that doesn't suck! Everything I've found so far falls into two categories, either (a) sucking, a lot, or (b) requiring, for inexplicable reasons, a database backend. I just want something that will handle file uploads and basic file management (move, rename, delete, copy). The solution should not try to provide any form of authentication. This is what my web server is for! Bonus points if it has (a) actually been touched in the past few years, (b) makes good use of CSS and (c) does a good job of separating logic and presentation in the code, because this makes my life much easier if I need to change something. I am reasonably language neutral -- in no particular order, Python, Perl, and PHP are preferable, because those are already installed on the target system and I'd like to avoid introducing any additional requirements.

I am trying to avoid getting a number of non-technical people to install WinSCP, since, among other things, this means I wouldn't be able to take advantage of our web single sign-on infrastructure. I would also like to provide people access that does not first require software installation.

How can I automatically add tracks to the OS X iTunes Library?

harkin banks — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 14:05:26 -0800

Is there a scriptable solution to add items to the OS X iTunes library? I am in the process of switching management of my iPod from my older XP desktop to my MacBook. For a couple of years now I have been using a homegrown Perl program to download podcasts, and then running the console version of iTunes Library Updater as a scheduled task to automatically add them to the iTunes library. It's great -- works totally in the background, and when I sync my iPod everything is Just There.

I'd like to duplicate this process on my MacBook. The Perl script obviously ports fine, and I can schedule it using cron, but I can't find a way to automatically add items to the iTunes library. Some things I've considered:

-- iTLU is written in .NET, so that's out (unless it runs under mono -- but I fear that way lies madness.)

-- At Doug's Applescripts, the suggested solution is to add a folder action to the folder you want to watch. However, my understanding is that folder actions only work if the folder is actively being worked with in the Finder (open, having things dropped on it, etc.), so adding files to my podcast folder behind the scenes won't trigger a folder action.

-- There's a Mac::iTunes module on CPAN, but it looks pretty unfinished (for instance, under "Bugs" for Mac::iTunes::Library::Write it says "just wait".)

This is for a MacBook running Leopard. Any suggestions?

Regex crisis...

twine42 — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:02:04 -0800

Regular Expressions / PHP preg_replace problem. Can this be made to work...? I've got a long string of text that will contain something like this...
  <container>aa<alpha>t</alpha>bb<beta>i</beta>dd</container>

I want to have a nice little bit of regex that plucks the 't' from alpha and the 'i' from beta. In itself okay. Except I want it to match correctly if it finds
  <container>aa<beta>i</beta>bb<alpha>t</alpha>dd</container>
and for it to get what it can if someone misses a field, like this...
  <container>aa<alpha>t</alpha>bb</container>

My basic knowledge of regexes suggests the following should have worked, but as you can guess from my question, it doesn't.
  @<container>([^<>]*)((<alpha>(.*?)</alpha>)|(<beta>(.*?)</beta>)|(^<>]*?))*([^<>]*)</container>@mi

Help...?

Perl & mod_fcgid- how can I make sure it's running & being taken advantage of?

paul_smatatoes — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 13:13:01 -0800

I have a couple Perl scripts I'm publishing soon, and I want to make sure they'll run under mod_fcgid in order to keep the server load as low as possible. Previously, I've only ever run scripts that test FastCGI (ie, while ( my $q = new CGI::Fast ) { $count++; echo $count;}) or taken advantage of larger Perl packages (like MovableType) that claim to run as FCGI as long as you set up Apache & FastCGI/mod_fcgid properly and change the file suffix to ".fcgi". So, here's my question: do I need to do anything besides change the file suffix of my scripts, and if so, what?

How can I load (and sort) a really huge text file in Perl?

kosmonaut — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:06:49 -0800

How do I load and then sort a really huge (94 MB) text file list of words? Perl runs out of memory trying to load all the lines-- before I have a chance to try to sort it. My text file contains a list of words, one per line. I'd like to sort this list into alphabetical order (and then ultimately traverse the sorted list to easily parse out all of the non-unique tokens). Here is what I was doing in Perl:



open LARGELIST, "large_source_file.txt" or die $!;

print "Loading file...\n";

@lines = [LARGELIST];

print "Done";

@sorted = sort(@lines);

(The brackets around LARGELIST are supposed to be the less-than and greater-than signs, but that would get stripped out in AskMeFi for looking like an HTML tag.)

After chugging for a while, perl runs out of memory while at the loading-file stage. I'm definitely not a Perl guru, so is there a more memory-efficient way I should do this (or is there some entirely different approach/language I should be trying)?

uploading/downloading huge files

Zed_Lopez — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:10:28 -0800

How to code a Perl web app to upload/download HUGE files? A straight HTTP upload/download for my app is untenable because I'm dealing with files of hundreds of megs each. I'd like to see a solution that would offer progress bars, and (more importantly) the ability to restart incomplete uploads or downloads.

The existing app is Apache 1.3/mod_perl/perl 5.8. Uploads require a login; downloads don't, but are limited inasmuch as they're keyed by UUIDs that are only considered valid in a short time-window. (I don't want the downloaders to see the real filename or location, but I suppose could make a link named for the UUID that gets deleted after its valid lifetime if I pursue an FTPish solution.)

I'm open to ditching doing the uploading and downloading in the browser if need be and requiring users to install client software to upload/download, but the download solution would need to be simple, easy, and available for all of Windows, Mac, and Linux. The upload solution would need to be simple and available for Windows.

But ideally, something AJAXy on the client-side and Perl (or plays-well-with-Perl) on the server-side can save the day and allow me to stick with the browser. I haven't done anything like this before. Anyone have any suggestions?

(3d-party hosting isn't an option.)

How do I make simple dynamic web pages using perl?

zzztimbo — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:24:58 -0800

How should I develop simple dynamic web pages using perl? Does anyone have any suggestions on how best to produce simple web pages in perl that execute logic (e.g., opening property documents to retrieve property values and saving back changes). I am new to perl and would like some detail instructions or links to tutorials. Would a framework like Mason be overkill?

Need a replacement for formmail.pl

the matching mole — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 08:02:41 -0800

What is a proven contemporary replacement for formmail.pl? I am about to drag some websites created in 1997 into 2008. These websites use formmail.pl to capture information from input forms and email it off to someone.

After I strip all of the Claris Homepage tags out of the HTML (!), I'll need something to capture the information, write it to a file, and periodically email that file. The host computer is an Intel Xserve managed by me, and is running OS X Server 10.5.3, so I have Apache, Perl, MySQL, and PHP at my disposal. The pages are simple HTML, but can be converted to PHP if necessary.

OSS is preferred, but I will pay for a solution. I'm mostly an interface/admin guy, so writing my own Perl script just ain't gonna happen. I'm looking for a plug, tweak, and play solution.

Any recommendations?

Live AIS data is a web browser

kaozity — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:55:58 -0800

Hi, Another oddball question... I have a live data stream of AIS data and I would like to take the data and ultimately display it on a world map through a web browser. The problem is that I have no clue as to how I would display live updated information on a map. I would like the map to update as the stream of data is coming in. This might be an ambitious project for someone who is weak on web programming, but i figured it would be worth looking into.

Computer languages considered in linguistic contexts?

AmbroseChapel — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:43:42 -0800

Computer languages considered in linguistic contexts? I've volunteered to give a talk about computer languages, for an audience which is primarily interested in linguistics, not computers.

One thing I'm definitely going to be talking about is Perl, which is unusual among computer languages in that, for instance, it has "pronouns". For more detail, see Larry Wall's "Natural Language Principles In Perl". Wall deliberately went against the grain of language construction, it seems to me, in that he didn't aim for perfection or concision, whereas most language creators would seem to be aiming for something more like a Philosophical Language.

Another example of a correlation -- I read in Pinker's "The Language Instinct" that English only has one first-person plural, "we", but other languages have more than one, which distinguish between "only you and I", "you and I and some other people", "some other people and I but not you" etc. Could that be considered analogous to "strong typing" in a computer language, where you can't have a variable be a number at one point, then a text string at another point?

I'm just looking for any interesting resources, links, opinions, ideas on the subject.

It's not an academic audience, and I don't have to rise to the standard of a formal lecture, just to be interesting. And I know more about the computer side than the linguistics side, so go easy on me if you're a linguist.

Can I write to a div using Perl, or otherwise solve my form submission problem?

unsigned — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:11:10 -0800

Can I write to a div using Perl, or otherwise solve my form submission problem? I have a Perl/CGI form mailer script that I didn't write and shouldn't edit too much, but can somewhat.

It's currently set up so that I can define the thank you page and error page within the Perl file. I don't want it to redirect to those pages however. I want to display the messages on the page the form is on instead, without reloading if possible. I played around with redirecting to the same page but appending a parameter in the URL. Then using JS to show a div if that var was set. But I'm realizing I need to display some of the items submitted from the form and I don't know how to keep those values since the page is being refreshed.

I don't know Perl so I don't know if there is a better way to do this, but can I do something like write to a div with Perl? Other ideas?

need a library for text classification

chexov — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 16:17:29 -0800

I need to be able to automatically identify language (English, Japaneese, Russian, etc ... ) in which a particular blog-post has been written. (lang attribute might or might not be available). Few years ago I came across a library for RSS feeds that was doing roughly what I need - can not find it anymore though.

Make Apache recognize Perl!

kaozity — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:49:15 -0800

How can I get my web server to interpret perl I am playing around with perl for the first time in my life. I am using a fedora core 8 machine. It seems to ave all the essentials installed already (apache, php, mySQL, and perl). However, I make a file called perl.pl and it does not seem to translate correctly. Here is what is in the file:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Content-type: text/html \n\n"; #HTTP HEADER

# DEFINE SOME SCALAR VARIABLES
$number = "5";
$exponent = "2 ** 8";
$string = "Hello, PERL!";
$stringpart_1 = "Hello, ";
$stringpart_2 = "PERL!";
$linebreak = "
"; #HTML LINEBREAK TAG

# PRINT THEM TO THE BROWSER
print $number;
print $linebreak;
print $exponent;
print $linebreak;
print $string.$linebreak;
print $stringpart_1.$stringpart_2;

When you go the the browser, you see the following
http://[ip address]/perl/perl.pl

As you can see, you prints out exactly what I type. Am I doing anything wrong? Am I suppose to enable a perl service or change a configuration file?

Redirecting users by IP in Apache

Oktober — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:16:56 -0800

How do I redirect incoming website visitors to an external site by IP address? I'm the general sysadmin here and don't do much web stuff other than simple content updating, but I think I'm on the right track with adding this bit of mod_rewrite code to the end of the httpd.conf file...

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} ^12\.345\.678\.9$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/index.php$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://test.foo.com/$1 [R]

Any ideas why this isn't working?

(apache 1.3.33 on OS X)