You could use Perl's internal format defintions. Here's an example that should work for you. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

# Define various fields that we use in the format

my $name  = "TMH";
my $title = "PerlMonk";
my $story = 'The Mad Hatter (TMH) was a crazy monk.  It was thought' .
            ' to be due to the mercury used to get rid of the dust ' .
            'on hats...';
            
# This is the key part.  A format is a series of fieldlines and
# valuelines.  Fieldlines define what the format looks like, valueline
+s
# specify what datagoes in the fields.  Fields that start with @ are
# fixed character widthfields.  The < specifies that it is
# left-justified.  | (centered) and > (right-justified) are also
# valid.  The number of those specifiers is the width of the field. 
# The ^ is a filled field; it breaks text up (at word boundries) into
# conveniently sized lines.  The double tilde (~) at the beginning of
# the third line specifies that the line should expand dynamically.
# This allows the filled field to take up as many lines of that size a
+s
# it needs to.  We use the format name STDOUT so that the format
# affects that filehandle.

format STDOUT = 
@<<<<<<   @<<<<<<<<<   ^<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
$name,    $title,      $story
~~                     ^<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
                       $story
.

# Print doesn't work with formats, so write must be used.  write
# defaults to sending to STDOUT and looks for the format STDOUT.

write;

[download]
That prints 
TMH       PerlMonk     The Mad Hatter (TMH) was a
                       crazy monk.  It was thought
                       to be due to the mercury
                       used to get rid of the dust
                       on hats...

[download]
Added new code. Now with comments! ;-)

In reply to Re: format by The Mad Hatter
in thread Multi-line output with format 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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    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
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