Perl Excel parser truncating columns

Question

I am new to Perl and trying to decode a Perl script which reads an Excel file and export the data into a text file. One of the steps in the script is performing weirdly. This is the step:

@array_name = grep {$_} @array_name;

This step just truncates the last column if the value is 0; otherwise it works properly. If I remove this step, the last column with value 0 is back, but it includes some dummy NULL columns in my extract which are not part of my source Excel file.

Can someone please help me understand this step?

Answer 1

The grep command filters non empty content. So everything that does not evaluate as true will be discarded. Empty cells and cells containing 0 will be removed. If you just want to remove empty cells you could use

@array_name = grep { defined && length } @array_name ;

instead.