Re: Re: Scanning a text file

my $searchfor = shift;
$/="%%%\n";
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Works EXACTLY how I need. With a few modifications this will run perfectly, thank you! Do you think you could explain what $/="%%%\n"; is doing? I've never seen or used $/ before.

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Re: Re: Re: Scanning a text file by graff (Chancellor) on Apr 10, 2004 at 05:25 UTC
In case the many replies using this approach have not made it clear, you can get more information about $/ from running "perldoc perlvar", and scanning down till you see this one described (with the long name "$INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR"). Normally -- i.e. by default -- $/ = "\n" (which in reality would be "\r\n" on MS-DOS/Windows systems, "\r" on "Classic" macs, and truly "\n" on unixes). It's the character pattern that is removed from the end of a string when you "chomp" the string, and it is the pattern that the diamond operator looks for when reading data from a file handle into a scalar, to know when to stop. If set to "undef", it causes a single read operation to absorb the entire file and assign it all to a single scalar.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Re: Scanning a text file
by graff (Chancellor) on Apr 10, 2004 at 05:25 UTC

It's the character pattern that is removed from the end of a string when you "chomp" the string, and it is the pattern that the diamond operator looks for when reading data from a file handle into a scalar, to know when to stop. If set to "undef", it causes a single read operation to absorb the entire file and assign it all to a single scalar.

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