Newline?

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

Say I have a file which looks like this:
Hey\tThere
It's two words, 'Hey' and 'There', seperated with a tab char. I've called this file 'dummy'. I then run this little code snippet:

$ perl -e 'open FILE, "dummy"; print "A\tTab\n"; while(<FILE>) { print
+; }'
[download]

This results in:

A    Tab
Hey\tThere

a) Why isn't my line interpolated? Not even print "$_"; will do the tab.
b) How can I make it print out my tab?

Comment on Newline? Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Newline? by lhoward (Vicar) on Jul 21, 2000 at 17:20 UTC
This is happening because string interpolation (when /t is turned into a tab) occurs when the scalar is loaded with the string. The double-quotes, as you used in your program cause interpolation to occur. Single quotes, reading data from a file, etc. cause no interpolation to occur. You have two possibilities: 1. translate the \t to a tab character. i.e. =~s/\\t/\t/g; 2. use an eval to force interpolation. `eval "\$f=qq/$_/"; print $f;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Newline? by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 21, 2000 at 14:05 UTC
Your question is either unclear or wrong. I made myself the following test file : Hallo Da Dies Test Ist ein And your script works as I think it should, as it prints out : `A Tab Hallo Da Dies Test Ist ein` [download] Maybe you should rephrase your question ... Is it maybe that you have a literal `"\t"` (and not the TAB character) ? Then maybe a regular expression replacing `\t` by `\009` would do what you want ... `s/\\t/\009/g` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Newline? by lindex (Friar) on Jul 22, 2000 at 02:21 UTC
just my output :) `~(pts)$ echo -ne "Hi\tThere\n" > dummy ~(pts)$ cat dummy Hi There ~(pts)$ vi dummy :set list 1 Hi^IThere$ :x ~(pts)$ perl -e 'open(FILE,"dummy"); print "A\tTab\n"; print <FILE>;' A Tab Hi There ~(pts)$` [download] lindex `/**************************/ jason@gost.net, wh@ckz.org http://jason.gost.net /***************************/` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]