formline
formline
formline PICTURE,LIST
This is an internal function used by format
s, though you may call it, too. It formats (see perlform) a list of values according to the contents of PICTURE, placing the output into the format output accumulator, $^A
(or $ACCUMULATOR
in English). Eventually, when a write
is done, the contents of $^A
are written to some filehandle. You could also read $^A
and then set $^A
back to ""
. Note that a format typically does one formline
per line of form, but the formline
function itself doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the PICTURE- This means that the ~
and ~~
tokens treat the entire PICTURE as a single line. You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single record format, just like the format
compiler.
Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, because an @
character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name. formline
always returns true- See perlform for other examples.
If you are trying to use this instead of write
to capture the output, you may find it easier to open a filehandle to a scalar (open $fh, ">", \$output
) and write to that instead.
© 1993–2016 Larry Wall and others
Licensed under the GNU General Public License version 1 or later, or the Artistic License.
The Perl logo is a trademark of the Perl Foundation.
http://perldoc.perl.org/5.22.0/functions/formline.html