Re^3: Print 4 Lines below matching criteria

They are not in scalar context. To be in scalar context you would need to do:

my ( $city, $phone, $street, $zip ) = ( scalar <DATA>, scalar <DATA>, 
+scalar <DATA>, scalar <DATA> );
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Re^4: Print 4 Lines below matching criteria by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Nov 16, 2006 at 08:37 UTC
Or the slightly cleaner `my ( $city, $phone, $street, $zip ) = map scalar <DATA>, 1 .. 4;` [download] Or the somewhat obscure but useful: `chomp( my ( $city, $phone, $street, $zip ) = map scalar <DATA>, 1 .. 4 + );` [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.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^4: Print 4 Lines below matching criteria by McDarren (Abbot) on Nov 16, 2006 at 08:19 UTC
"They are not in scalar context." You are absolutely correct! And this is the part where I need to put my hand up and admit that I have "cargo-culted" this technique without really taking the time to work out what was really going on. I first saw this technique used in some code written by a co-worker some years ago. It was basically used to read a fixed number of lines from a very small configuration file. I adopted it and have used it from time to time to do the same thing. Fortunately, I've never been bitten because I've never used it in a loop to retrieve multiple "sets". My apologies to the OP, and thanks for pointing this out. Cheers, Darren	[reply]