Hello Monks, first time posting. I am trying to convert thousands of HTML files to a single PDF using wkhtmltopdf (called through a Perl script); this works via the Windows 7 command line like so:

wkhtmltopdf file1.htm file2.htm output.pdf

My issue is that the command line reaches its character limit when I try to add my string of file names as an argument. My workaround so far is to split the string into ~5000 character sections, which works when typed out literally like so:

my $result = `wkhtmltopdf.exe $lists[0] $lists[1] $lists[2] $project.pdf`;

However, since the number of HTML files varies from project to project, I cannot hard code the $list indexes, since @lists could have any number of indexes. I have tried working around this using a for-loop to created a string like so:

    # Split up master list into smaller strings so that command line l
+imit is not reached (limit to around 5000 chars)
    my @lists = $masterList =~ /(.{5000,}? )/g;
    # build the string of filename groups for pdf conversion
    my $htmlFiles = "";
    for (my $y = 0; $y < $#lists; $y++)
    {
        $htmlFiles.= "\$lists[$y] ";
    }
[download]

I then make the system call with backticks like so:

    my $result = `wkhtmltopdf.exe $htmlFiles $project.pdf`;

This creates a small empty pdf, giving no errors. I know the issue (I think)... the backticks make Perl replace $htmlFiles with the string $htmlFiles, but once that replacement is made, the string contents do not get interpolated (ie. $lists[0] remains $lists[0] and not the contents of the first index of @lists).

Since I am relatively new to Perl (2 months in), I'm lost and searching for solutions has been difficult. If Perl cannot perform these multi-level interpolations, can someone suggest a solution?

Thank you, Colin