in reply to matching paragraphs

If you have a look at perlvar, in the $/ section, you have this:

       $/      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.  Set-
               ting it to "\n\n" means something slightly differ-
               ent than setting to "", if the file contains con-
               secutive 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.

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So, if you set $/="" you'll get something similar to your needs (if I'm understanding what you need).

I would also recommend you to localize $/, so it will return to the previous value. So, you can surroud your paragraphs with tags with something like that: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
my @paras = do { local $/=""; <DATA> }; #Idiom localizing $/
for (@paras){
        print "<html paragraph>\n";
        print $_;
        print "</html paragraph>\n";
}
__DATA__
This is the first paragraph of text.

This is the second.
This is also the second.



This is the 3rd.

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P.D.: You should read Writeup Formatting Tips, please put code tags around your code.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: matching paragraphs
by imhotep (Novice) on Apr 18, 2005 at 20:13 UTC
    Thanks for your reply! How do I get the input in? The file is in the same folder and thus far I have only learnt how to work from standard input using a while loop e.g.
    while ($line =<>); etc.
    I cannot see where the input is coming from? Apologies for my lack of understanding!!!!
[reply]
      • <> is an abreviation for < ARGV> and takes a filespec from the command line.
      • < STDIN> reads from STDIO, 
        open FH, /dev/null or die "Can't open file\n";
while <FH> {
 #your code
}

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        This code sais: open the file /dev/null and give me a filehandle FH as a reference. Then read from the file referenced by FH and put that into $_. Stop reading at the end of the file.

        Reread post and ammended:

        imhotep wrote:

        #The variable, input in this case being #standard input

        That is wrong. You opened input.txt and created a filehandle INPUT. You are reading from input.txt.

        s//----->\t/;$~="JAPH";s//\r<$~~/;{s|~$~-|-~$~|||s |-$~~|$~~-|||s,<$~~,<~$~,,s,~$~>,$~~>,, $|=1,select$,,$,,$,,1e-1;print;redo}
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[d/l]

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