as it were. A more complete example, with comments, can be found at
http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/TOMC/scripts/toms.exrc.gz
-The a2ps http://www-inf.enst.fr/%7Edemaille/a2ps/black+white.ps.gz does
+The a2ps http://www-inf.enst.fr/%7Edemaille/a2ps/black+white.ps does
lots of things related to generating nicely printed output of
documents, as does enscript at http://people.ssh.fi/mtr/genscript/.
=head1 NAME
-perlfaq5 - Files and Formats ($Revision: 1.12 $, $Date: 2002/03/11 22:25:25 $)
+perlfaq5 - Files and Formats ($Revision: 1.13 $, $Date: 2002/03/16 15:37:26 $)
=head1 DESCRIPTION
open FILE, "<", " file "; # filename is " file "
open FILE, ">", ">file"; # filename is ">file"
+
It may be a lot clearer to use sysopen(), though:
which allow you to tie an array to a file so that accessing an element
the array actually accesses the corresponding line in the file.
-On very rare occasion, you may have an algorithm that demands that
-the entire file be in memory at once as one scalar. The simplest solution
-to that is
-
- $var = `cat $file`;
-
-Being in scalar context, you get the whole thing. In list context,
-you'd get a list of all the lines:
-
- @lines = `cat $file`;
-
-This tiny but expedient solution is neat, clean, and portable to
-all systems on which decent tools have been installed. For those
-who prefer not to use the toolbox, you can of course read the file
-manually, although this makes for more complicated code.
+You can read the entire filehandle contents into a scalar.
{
local(*INPUT, $/);
$var = do { local $/; <INPUT> };
+For ordinary files you can also use the read function.
+
+ read( INPUT, $var, -s INPUT );
+
+The third argument tests the byte size of the data on the INPUT filehandle
+and reads that many bytes into the buffer $var.
+
=head2 How can I read in a file by paragraphs?
Use the C<$/> variable (see L<perlvar> for details). You can either
decoding a URL and checking whether something is a number are handled
with regular expressions, but those answers are found elsewhere in
this document (in L<perlfaq9>: ``How do I decode or create those %-encodings
-on the web'' and L<perlfaq4>: ``How do I determine whether a scalar is
+on the web'' and L<perfaq4>: ``How do I determine whether a scalar is
a number/whole/integer/float'', to be precise).
=head2 How can I hope to use regular expressions without creating illegible and unmaintainable code?