I have tried every suggestion I could find on how to pull (aka Slurp) the text of a file into a perl program and all of them that say they should work weren't. I am on a Mac Mini with Lion (10.7), and the perl version is 5.12. Here are some that I've tried:


#!/usr/local/env Perl5.12
### filename:Hello.pl

use strict;
use File::Slurp;

my $string;

open (my $QBF, "<QBF.txt");

$string = read_file($QBF);

print "\n";
print $string + "\n"; # doesn't print anything. (or prints "0")
print "\n";

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## ----------------- 

use File::Slurp;

open my $fh, "<", "QBF.txt" or die $!;
    local $/; # enable localized slurp mode
    my $content = <$fh>;
    close $fh;
print $content; # doesn't print anything.

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At least last night is wasn't working. I had started with a while loop which worked fine by itself: 

print"\n";
 open (my $QBF, "QBF.txt");
 while (<$QBF>) {
       print;
 }

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after that I was trying to add the other methods for "slurping", into that same program, and it wasn't until I segregated them into two separate files that the second version worked.

use File::Slurp;

open my $fh, "<", "QBF.txt" or die $!;
    local $/; # enable localized slurp mode
    my $content = <$fh>;
    close $fh;
print $content; # prints now.

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So what I'm wondering is if i put these two pieces of code together, is the read pointer already at the end of the file, and that's why they won't work in succession? It seemed like I was only getting one output even though I had two different routines for extracting (one just prints, the other saves the file contents to a local scalar for processing, and then prints.) Also I'd like to know more about what "$/" is and how it works Thanks.

In reply to Contents of a file into a scalar by MarkofPerl

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