in reply to Control Characters in reports...

thor writes:

My problem is that in the final report, there is a "^L" at the beginning of each report.

Yup. That's a "Form feed" - you get 'em for free with write. According to Programming Perl (2nd Ed),

Top-of-form processing is handled automatically: if there is insufficient room on the current page for the formatted record, the page is advanced by writing a form feed,

When you set $- to zero, you're forcing a new "page", and hence ^L, on every write. Tinkering with that and $= ought to let you get rid of the ^L problem.

Peace,
-McD

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Re: Re: Control Characters in reports...
by thor (Priest) on Feb 23, 2001 at 03:59 UTC
    Thanks for the info. Now the problem is getting everything to print out. It seems that if I set $- to anything but zero, the header won't print, but everything else prints without the form feed. My question now is: how is $- used? The way that I am thinking of it is every write that is performed, perl checks against $- and determines whether it can get that line on the current page or not. Am I correct in this? Thanks, thor
      I just found a cheat. If you set $^L = "", the form feeds disappear! Yeah. thor