I don't generally like statement modifiers.

You don't have to follow me on that, but statement modifiers can help making your code clearer and more concise.

Consider for instance this (somewhat meaningless) example:

while (<$IN>) {
    next if /^\s*$/;   # remove empty lines
    next if /^\s*#/;   # remove comments
    next if /ORA/i;    # remove lines with Oracle warnings and errors
    next unless some_condition($_);
    last if /File processed/;
    # ... now do the actual processing of useful lines
}
[download]

If you wanted to do the same with regular conditionals, you would need about three times as many code lines, and it would probably end up being less clear.

Update: added a missing closing parenthesis to the while condition.<\small>

---

In reply to Re^3: breaking up a file by delimiter by Laurent_R
in thread breaking up a file by delimiter by navalned

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