This is really cool. Given that I have been thinking about developing an iOS app for field researchers, the timing on this could not have been better: [TinkerLearn](https://www.tinkerlearn.com/xray) aims to teach you iOS development by showing you a real app and walking you through its source code. What you get is an Xcode project with lots and lots of comments. You can run it yourself and then see what works and what doesn’t work.

If we taught writing the way programming is often taught, we would never have students read any kind of writing before asking them to write themselves, which is somewhat nonsensical. The way we learn so much of what we learn is through mimicry, mimicry leads competency, and, with desire and discipline, competency can lead to mastery.

And I love the logo:

Make no mistake: my coding fu remains quite weak. Still, something as simple as splitting a text file into smaller files based on a small string that sits on a line by itself shouldn’t be too hard of a problem. Well, the splitting isn’t that hard when someone hands you a Perl script. What’s hard is finding a way to split the files for yourself and also to have the files named after the string by which they were split.

What do I mean by this? I have a large text file, two of them actually, which are made up of over one hundred texts each. Each text begins with `–###–` and proceeds for some number of lines before the next `–###–` occurs.

I would like to split these larger files into their constituent parts and have each of those parts be contained in a file named, `###`. This shouldn’t be as hard as it is. I have tried:

split -p ‘^–[0-9][0-9][0-9]–‘ mytext.txt

And:

csplit -k individuals.txt /–[0-9][0-9][0-9]–/

And that’s just to split the file. (Neither worked.) This Perl script did:

#!/usr/bin/perl

open(FI,”individuals_refs.txt”);
read(FI,$_,10000000);
close(FI);
@arr = split(‘–[0-9][0-9][0-9]–‘);
$cnt=0;
for $c (@arr)
{
open(FO,”>$cnt.txt”);
print FO $c;
close(FO);
$cnt++;
}

But it simply labels the files by number, which loses their original identifying number.