in reply to Re: Using '/r' with '~~ $var' in format
in thread Using '/r' with '~~ $var' in format

Well, you are right that a practical answer is to change the approach. But there's stuff behind the question that you can't see ;-)

Quoting Larry/The Camel Book,
The truly desperate can generate their own format on the fly...

When my program runs, I won't know what is in the $line string, i.e. it won't always be data types like sig and prep_by. (And I also build the FORMAT definition in a subroutine but I thought that would distract from my question.) Practically speaking, the data will usually be paragraphs with newlines for separators, and it's these blank lines that I particularly want respected. But as my Version D shows, I'd really like any newline within $line to be respected.

  • Comment on Re: Using '/r' with '~~ $var' in format--"formats on the fly"

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Re: Re: Using '/r' with '~~ $var' in format--"formats on the fly"
by grep (Monsignor) on Nov 02, 2002 at 00:01 UTC

    What about ditching format? It sounds like your needs will be surpassing what format will do easily (and more importaintly if you do pull it off, it sounds like a maintainence nightmare).

    Template Toolkit sounds like a great fit for you. TT is designed to template any job not just HTML (as long as you don't need pagination)



    grep
    Mynd you, mønk bites Kan be pretti nasti...
[reply]
      It looks like Template Toolkit will be useful for the next stage in my process in which I officially present the data and the user doesn't need it in Word. Thanks for the tip. For this particular stage, I just need to create a rough draft and using 'format' statements will be sufficient (esp. since I've already written the code :-) So the question remains, how might I use \r to achieve embedded newlines that will be respected by '~~ $var' lines within a format statement?
[reply]

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