From perldoc perlvar
$/ The input record separator, newline by default.
This influences Perl's idea of what a "line" is.
Works like awk's RS variable, including treating
empty lines as a terminator if set to the null
string. (An empty line cannot contain any spaces or
tabs.) You may set it to a multi-character string
to match a multi-character terminator, or to "undef"
to read through the end of file. Setting it to
"\n\n" means something slightly different than
setting to "", if the file contains consecutive
empty lines. Setting to "" will treat two or more
consecutive empty lines as a single empty line.
Setting to "\n\n" will blindly assume that the next
input character belongs to the next paragraph, even
if it's a newline. (Mnemonic: / delimits line
boundaries when quoting poetry.)
local $/; # enable "slurp" mode
local $_ = <FH>; # whole file now here
s/\n \t+/ /g;
Remember: the value of $/ is a string, not a regex.
awk has to be better for something. :-)
Setting $/ to a reference to an integer, scalar
containing an integer, or scalar that's convertible
to an integer will attempt to read records instead
of lines, with the maximum record size being the
referenced integer. So this:
local $/ = \32768; # or \"32768", or \$var_containing_32768
open my $fh, $myfile or die $!;
local $_ = <$fh>;
will read a record of no more than 32768 bytes from
FILE. If you're not reading from a record-oriented
file (or your OS doesn't have record-oriented
files), then you'll likely get a full chunk of data
with every read. If a record is larger than the
record size you've set, you'll get the record back
in pieces.
On VMS, record reads are done with the equivalent of
"sysread", so it's best not to mix record and non-
record reads on the same file. (This is unlikely to
be a problem, because any file you'd want to read in
record mode is probably unusable in line mode.)
Non-VMS systems do normal I/O, so it's safe to mix
record and non-record reads of a file.
In reply to Re: help substituting whitespaces?
by Abstraction
in thread help substituting whitespaces?
by Anonymous Monk
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