nmerriweather has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

playing with formats today, i read Formats and Variables

which was great! because for my formatting needs, formline() seemed to be even better than format -- my desire was to loop through an array, and format each element into the line style -- a 60col wide line with centered text and | at each site 

example:
|          centered text line!          |

[download]

learning formline though, my code ended up as something like: 

$^A = '';
$printIt = "+-----------------------+\n";
foreach $line (@lines){
     formline("| \@|||||||||||||||||||| |\n",$line);
}
$printIt .= $^A;
$printIt .= "+-----------------------+\n";

[download]

without the line "$^A = '';", running this again (its in a subroutine) churns out the last time's results

this seems kind of... messy... to me

is there a better way?
can i do this without nullifying $^A?
is it possible to do this (center, left/right justify text) with sprintf instead?
advice?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: sprintf vs formline
by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Sep 03, 2002 at 03:56 UTC

    You probably should localize $^A:

    sub foo {
    local $^A;
    my @lines = @_;
    my $printIt = "+-----------------------+\n";
    foreach $line (@lines){
        formline("| \@|||||||||||||||||||| |\n",$line);
    }
    $printIt .= $^A;
    $printIt .= "+-----------------------+\n";
    return $printIt;
}

    [download]

    See perlvar for more details.

    After Compline,
    Zaxo

[reply]
[d/l]
      that works well!

      I tried using 'my' earlier -- just because i'm in the habit of my vs local -- but that triggered an error

      never thought of trying local instead -- figured it would just spew an error as well.

      obviously, it didn't

[reply]
        Local is used for "hiding" the current value of a package level (dynamic variable) for the duration of a scoped block. Note that duration means temporal and not the spatial aspect of a scoped block.

        (Well actually you can localize array indexes and hash entries in lexicals too, but people dont do this often.)

        Yves / DeMerphq
        ---
        Software Engineering is Programming when you can't. -- E. W. Dijkstra (RIP)

[reply]
Re: sprintf vs formline
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on Sep 03, 2002 at 14:00 UTC
    You needn't use an extra variable either, btw. 
    sub foo {
    local $^A = "+-----------------------+\n";
    formline "| \@|||||||||||||||||||| |\n", $_ for @_;
    $^A .= "+-----------------------+\n";
    return $^A;
}

    [download]

    Makeshifts last the longest.

[reply]
[d/l]

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