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Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) has really taken off the last few years, as both devices and the cost of experiments have dramatically declined. NGS decipher the identity (base composition, the sequence of letters in the alphabet of DNA and RNA) of nucleic acids and return the results in the fastq open data format. Fastq files are flat text files with a standardized layout: each molecule present in the sample that is captured by the sequencer is represented with four fields:

1. a '@' character and is followed by a sequence identifier and an optional description


2. one (typically) or more lines of characters in the four letter alphabet of nucleic acids


3. a metadata field starting with the "+" optionally followed by the same sequence identifier and description as in the first field


4. one, or more lines of the quality of each symbol sequence reported in field 2
   

Hello everybody! For this week's weekly challenge I thought the challenges looked really easy, but they both had a couple slight complicating factors. Also, this was the first time I've used sub signatures.

Similar Words

For this one, we're looking for words that share all characters. We print out each pair of countries.

The three of us met today, and we:

• updated the status of stalled PPCs (after discussion with the proposers)
• assigned a number (0023) to the map my $x { } PPC
• discussed the evaluation order issue related to PPC 0021 (optional chaining)
• decided that future rejected PPCs should have a section that details why they were rejected
• discussed the tooling around the publication of dual-life modules on CPAN

These are some answers to the Week 233, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on September 10, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Similar Words

You are given an array of words made up of alphabets only.

Write a script to find the number of pairs of similar words. Two words are similar if they consist of the same characters.

Example 1

Input: @words = ("aba", "aabb", "abcd", "bac", "aabc")
Output: 2

Pair 1: similar words ("aba", "aabb")
Pair 2: similar words ("bac", "aabc")

Example 2

I was seeing this so much talk about smartmatch or given/when, I decided to experiment with a prototype powered pseudo structure I'd been thinking about. The results were pleasing to me, and I plan on releasing this soon. I could rename it to match/case (versus fu/on), but the huffman in me likes the short (and semi-ambiguous) "keywords". Let me know what you think in the comments below.

I still need to do more unit tests, POD, dist.ini, etc. But it's the closest I could get what I was observing on P5P. And the current implementation is about as fast and tight as I think it could be. I also enjoy using Perl's datatype coercion capabilities via prototypes* quite a bit. It is a very powerful, underutilized, and misunderstood capability that can be used to bring about a lot more ideas via a "keyword" experience (which is the entire point).

https://github.com/oodler577/p5-Dispatch-Fu

DESCRIPTION

Hi everybody! I'm finally back with another PWC/TWC blog post for week 230.

Separate Digits

For the first challenge we want to split all the numbers in the array into single digits. Here's the code:

use v5.36;
my @nums;
push(@nums, split(//, $_)) for @ARGV;
say $_ for @nums;

It very simply splits anything in its arguments into individual characters and pushes them onto a new array.

Count Words

Our second challenge asks us to count the words that start with the given prefix. Here's a 4-liner (minus boilerplate) to help us out with this one:

I've been programming in Perl for almost two decades now. A lot has changed in Perl, and also in the way I program with it.

Several years ago my partners and I started a software company, I was in charge of everything to do with tech, so as CTO it was my responsibility to choose the tech stack our company was going to use. And it was an easy one: Perl.

Years have gone by, our company has continued to grow, our product catalogue has increased and the amount of data processing and analysis we do it's exponentially higher than when we started. And Perl has continued to show what a great option it is.

I would like to list some of the reasons why Perl has been such a great fit for our company.

Versatility

These are some answers to the Week 231, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 27, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Senior Citizens

You are given a list of passenger details in the form “9999999999A1122”, where 9 denotes the phone number, A the sex, 1 the age and 2 the seat number.

Write a script to return the count of all senior citizens (age >= 60).

Example 1

Input: @list = ("7868190130M7522","5303914400F9211","9273338290F4010")
Ouput: 2

The age of the passengers in the given list are 75, 92 and 40.
So we have only 2 senior citizens.

Example 2

A little over ten years ago, when Perl 5.18 was approaching its release date, I released match::simple. This was mostly in response to the smartmatch operator (~~) being deprecated, but also a solution to the incredibly arcane rules for how the smartmatch operator operated.

match::simple was intended to be... simpler. The operator looks a little funky because it uses some clever trickery to fake being an infix operator:

    use match::simple;
    
    if ( $this |M| $that ) {
        ...;
    }

The Perl and Raku Conference 2023

The Perl and raku Conference 2023 in Toronto was an event I was really looking forward to. A chance to rub shoulders with the giants of Perl and Raku, absorb insights and innovations of the nerdy Perly community...everything they said in the blurb. It was very well organised thanks to Alex, Sawyer, Makoto, Amber and Peter, herding an army of volunteers. Such a knowledge-intensive event should be recorded for posterity, trapping the wisdoms and inspirations from the wise and inspiring in the container that is YouTube.

Well a nice banquate last night with good food and good company but a little sad that it was the last day.

To start off I atennded Sawyer X rather sad talk 'No one is Immune to Abuse' I cannot give this talk do justice in a short blog post so I suggest you seek out the recorded talk when it comes out. I will see if I can repost it here once it comes out. It had a large number of lessons for all of us in the Perl comunity.

Next up was me but unfortunetly I have some connection errors and had a little shorter talk and but both of the attendees gave me good feedback ;) oh well that is what happens when you are scheduled at the same time by two of the 'Big Wigs' in the Perl community. Luck of the draw I guess.

These are some answers to the Week 231, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 27, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Min Max

You are given an array of distinct integers.

Write a script to find all elements that is neither minimum nor maximum. Return -1 if you can’t.

Example 1

Input: @ints = (3, 2, 1, 4)
Output: (3, 2)

The minimum is 1 and maximum is 4 in the given array. So (3, 2) is neither min nor max.

Example 2

Input: @ints = (3, 1)
Output: -1

Example 3

Hi all! Back this week with both solutions to The Weekly Challenge for once. We've got a word counting challenge and one that I really don't know how to explain. You have to see the challenge to understand it.

Max Words

So this challenge is just to tell us what the longest sentence in a set of sentences is. How many words does it have? A very simple easy solution can follow:

my $highest;
foreach (@ARGV) {
    my @words = split(/ /, $_);
    shift @words if !$words[0];
    $highest = scalar @words if scalar @words > $highest;
}
say $highest;

Shirts and hoodies are available in variety of colours, sizes and styles. Stickers, mugs, and phone covers are also all available. With proceeds from sales funding The Perl and Raku Foundation.

Buy from https://the-perl-store.creator-spring.com/

Hot off the keyboard, is HTTP::State in trial form anyway. This is HTTP cookie jar supporting public suffix, same site, cookie partitioning and other goodies from RFC6265bis-draft and CHIPS. It makes cookie handling on the client side more in line with recent developments in browsers (browsing context, first-party partitioning etc).

While most of 'browsing context' and partitioning features are not directly usable in current Perl HTTP user agents, it eases the path for better cookie support in new/updated user agents.

In the mean time, a compatibility API allows drop in usage where ever HTTP::CookieJar is used. The main benefit for current user agents is a significant boost in cookie retrieval performance.

It is a trial of a first release, so probably has some teething issues and is currently limited v5.36.0 min perl. However if you want to give it a try, please do and give feedback if you can!

These are some answers to the Week 230, Task 2, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 20, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 2: Count Words

You are given an array of words made up of alphabetic characters and a prefix.

Write a script to return the count of words that starts with the given prefix.

Example 1

Input: @words  = ("pay", "attention", "practice", "attend")
       $prefix = "at"
Ouput: 2

Two words "attention" and "attend" starts with the given prefix "at".

Example 2

SQL::Inserter is new CPAN module based on what we are using at SpareRoom to easily manage buffered inserts, as well as to replace SQL::Abstract's slow insert method.

Inserter OO interface

The idea is that if you want to insert many rows of data (e.g. part of an ETL pipeline, or writing logs etc), you'd want to be doing that with multi-row INSERT statements. With SQL::Inserter you create a very lightweight object to handle inserting for you, just pass it a DBI db handle, the table name and the columns you'll be inserting (optional if you use hashes for inserting, see next section):

Hello everybody! It's another week with a new Perl Weekly Challenge. This week I'm only doing the first challenge, not because of time, but because the second challenge makes absolutely no sense to me. Perhaps a clarification will come out, but I'm not going to bother at the moment.

This week the challenge is to find the number of primes under the provided number. This is a challenge that really isn't worth rebuilding, and so I would recommend using Math::Prime::Util. You have to know when to just trust the professionals and use modules. With the use of M::P::U, we can essentially do the challenge in one line.

use Math::Prime::Util 'primes';
say scalar @{primes(shift)};

primes() returns an array reference, so we have to dereference the array after calling the function. We shift the number that is entered, call primes (which provides an array of the primes under that number), and dereference it and count it to print the answer.

It's that simple! This is a case where I definitely wouldn't recommend writing your own custom prime finder. I'll hopefully see you next week with the next challenge!

To celebrate the upcoming release of Perl 5.38 we are excited to offer Limited Edition* merchandise.

The design was a true team effort by the marketing committee and is inspired by the traditional Perl camel logo. We had a lot of fun throwing around ideas, then throwing them in to AI to see what it's randomness would come back with. We then passed the ideas to our artist for the final result.

Check them out on the official Perl store where proceeds go to The Perl and Raku Foundation which then directly fund grants etc.

* TBD how limited.

These are some answers to the Week 230, Task 1, of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few days from now (on August 20, 2023 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge. Please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

Task 1: Separate Digits

You are given an array of positive integers.

Write a script to separate the given array into single digits.

Example 1

Input: @ints = (1, 34, 5, 6)
Output: (1, 3, 4, 5, 6)

Example 2

Input: @ints = (1, 24, 51, 60)
Output: (1, 2, 4, 5, 1, 6, 0

This task is very simple. We just need to split each value of the input array into individual digits and collect them into a list or an array.

Separate Digits in Raku