You'll be in for a nasty surprise if you try and do that :) Try this snippet:

    use strict;
    seek DATA, 0, 0;
    print while <DATA>;
    __DATA__
    This
    is
    a
    test

[download]

From playing with that, you'll see that the seek returns to the beginning of the file, not the beginning of DATA. To correct that, you'll want to tell where DATA starts:

    use strict;
    my $start = tell DATA;
    seek DATA, $start, 0;
    print while <DATA>;
    __DATA__
    This
    is
    a
    test

[download]

Update: Reading jmcnamara's response. Boy, do I feel stupid. However, I'm now tempted to launch into my don't name a filehandle DATA rant, since this is a source of confusion (as demonstrated above). I recall ranting about this before. Humph. Maybe I'm just embarrassed :)

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

In reply to (Ovid) Re(2): data from one subroutine into a second by Ovid
in thread data from one subroutine into a second by basm100

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


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.