RE: Reordering fields in ASCII files

[Malcolm Smith <Malcolm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tim,
As suggested I am writing this to both yourself and to the list...
Perl is an amazing script language with it's roots in C.  It is freely
available on the Internet  (look for the Perl home site).  The
advantages of Perl are (a) it is an amazingly powerful language, (b) it
manipulates text files a dream, (c) it is fast, (d) the same script will
run on almost any platform.  The downside of Perl is that it is a little
hard to learn; the learning curve is quite awesome at first.
I have an example of a Perl script, which you may want to have,
somewhere in the depths of my web site (to be updated somewhen)
www.dragondrop.com <http://www.dragondrop.com>  and this checks the
quality of the price data in MetaStock format to make sure that the high
is higher than the low and all that stuff.  You may want to have a look
at this script and to use it yourself when you get Perl from the
internet.
The advantages of Perl is that the scripts are quite quickly written and
are easily shared by users with a similar interest.  Now, since that we
all use price data for our investment tools, it may be to our collective
advantage if a number of us starting to write and distribute Perl
scripts.  Anyway, I've a useful script on my site and everyone is more
than welcome to use and modigy it.
Malc
	-----Original Message-----
	From:	Tim Gadd [SMTP:timgadd@xxxxxxxxxxx]
	Sent:	25 August 1998 17:16
	To:	Malcolm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
	Subject:	Reordering fields in ASCII files

	Malcolm,

	Thanks for your response to my ASCII record reordering question
on the 
	Metastock discussion group. Since I am a few days late in
responding to 
	your return post, I thought I'd do it off the list. You may have
noticed 
	that there were a few other suggestions to use a perl script to 
	accomplish my objective. One fellow has even made a script
available for 
	download. I'm going to check it out but have to admit, that I'm
not sure 
	what a perl script even is. Maybe I'll be able to figure it out
after 
	downloading. Is this something I can run like an exe or bat file
after 
	providing input/output parameters or will I need a perl
interpreter?

	If replying, feel free to re-post to the list if you think it'll
be of 
	help to other perl-challenged subscribers.

	Thanks, again, for your suggestion.


	______________________________________________________
	Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com