This is a large and comprehensive site which seems to be mainly for the hard-core perl programmers so I hope you don't mind a quick question from a beginner? My problem is an @ symbol which appears at the end of my lines of text. The lines of text are read from a file and shoved through a 'format', where they are written back into another file. The lines of text which generate the mysterious '@' are feed into the 'format' where they are supposed to be written in a multi-line, as-much-as-you-can-give style, which is done by the @* line of code. Well, I hope I haven't confused you all too much. Here is some of my code. I hope you can pick up the problem from it: 
# This is my format

format FORMATTED =
<font face="Arial"> @<<<<<<<<< </font>
$date
@<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< $subject
@*
$article
</font><hr size="1" noshade></p>

.

# This is where the text is pulled from a file and written into anothe
+r using the format.

open(FORMATTED, "> $newspage") || sendError("can't write to $newspage"
+);
open(DATAFILE, $articalsdat) || sendError("cant open articles file");
while (<DATAFILE>)
        {
       chomp; # remove newline
       ($date,$subject,$article) = (split(/-!news-/));

       $date = "00/00/0000" if !defined($date);
       $subject = "no subject" if !defined($subject);
       $article  = "no article" if !defined($article);

        write(FORMATTED);
        }
close (DATAFILE);

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When the new file ($articalsdat) is viewed, there is an @ symbol after every line of $article? why? Will the kind monks help?

In reply to Strange @ appearance by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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