Well, you are right that a practical answer is to change the approach. But there's stuff behind the question that you can't see ;-)

Quoting Larry/The Camel Book,
The truly desperate can generate their own format on the fly...

When my program runs, I won't know what is in the $line string, i.e. it won't always be data types like sig and prep_by. (And I also build the FORMAT definition in a subroutine but I thought that would distract from my question.) Practically speaking, the data will usually be paragraphs with newlines for separators, and it's these blank lines that I particularly want respected. But as my Version D shows, I'd really like any newline within $line to be respected.

In reply to Re: Using '/r' with '~~ $var' in format--"formats on the fly" by ff
in thread Using '/r' with '~~ $var' in format by ff

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