I am thinking that reading the whole file into an array might turn out to be the simplest way to do this after all.

Try this

#! perl -slw
use strict;

chomp( $_ = <DATA> );
print "($_,";
while( <DATA> ) {
    chomp;
    $_ = "'$_'";
    last if eof(DATA);
    print "$_,";
}
print "$_)";
__DATA__
one
two
three
four
[download]

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

Lingua non convalesco, consenesco et abolesco. -- Rule 1 has a caveat! -- Who broke the cabal?

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

Ugh. That is definitely much less clear than his sed script. Without knowing what it’s supposed to do it’ll take blinking and staring to figure it out.

Rule of thumb: eof is about as meritorious as goto.

Makeshifts last the longest.

No, you just leave the line unterminated at the end of the loop and then check at the next iteration whether there was a previous line that needs terminating. The only time when that isn’t true is on the first line, which is a very simple condition. This leads to my trivial code below.

Makeshifts last the longest.

I am thinking that reading the whole file into an array might turn out to be the simplest way to do this after all.

Well, if your input files are not huge and you don't make this into a (bad) habit, that should be fine:

my @lines=map {chomp; "'$_'"} <>;
$"=",\n";
print "(@lines)\n";
[download]

Mind you: it can be done in less obscure ways, and it is certainly not the best one. Just wanted to show it to add one entry to the TMTOWTDI bag...

PS: even more obscurely:

$"=",\n";
print "(@{[map {chomp; qq|'$_'|} <>]})\n";
[download]