in reply to Useful usage of formats.
I use format quite often to generate sort-of manual pages for interfaces, e.g. while programming perl frontends to SAP. Sample output of that particular usage:
====================================================================== +========== Interface RFC_READ_TABLE ====================================================================== +========== +----------------------------------------------------------+---------- +---------+ | TABLE | DATA | LEN 512| INTYPE + 4| | STRUCT | TAB512 | VALUE LEN + 0 | +--------+---------------------------------+------+--------+--------+- +---------+ | POS | NAME | LEN | INTYPE | OFFSET | +DECIMALS | +--------+---------------------------------+------+--------+--------+- +---------+ | 1 | WA | 512 | 0 | | + 0 | | --- | - Summe - | 512 | | | + | +----------------------------------------------------------+---------- +---------+ | TABLE | FIELDS | LEN 103| INTYPE + 4| | STRUCT | RFC_DB_FLD | VALUE LEN + 0 | +--------+---------------------------------+------+--------+--------+- +---------+ | POS | NAME | LEN | INTYPE | OFFSET | +DECIMALS | +--------+---------------------------------+------+--------+--------+- +---------+ | 1 | FIELDNAME | 30 | 0 | | + 0 | | 2 | OFFSET | 6 | 6 | 30 | + 0 | | 3 | LENGTH | 6 | 6 | 36 | + 0 | | 4 | TYPE | 1 | 0 | 42 | + 0 | | 5 | FIELDTEXT | 60 | 0 | 43 | + 0 | | --- | - Summe - | 103 | | | + | ... ====================================================================== +========== Parameter ====================================================================== +========== |------------------------------------+-------------------------------- +---------+ | PARAMETER DELIMITER | STRUCTURE (none) + | | VALUE | LEN | TYPE | INTYPE | DECIMALS | DEFA +ULT | | | 1 | IN | | 0 | + 0| |------------------------------------+-------------------------------- +---------+ | PARAMETER NO_DATA | STRUCTURE (none) + | | VALUE | LEN | TYPE | INTYPE | DECIMALS | DEFA +ULT | | | 1 | IN | | 0 | + 0|
There's some ANSI color highlighting that I can't show in a <code> block. This lets me skim through an interface definition while developing whithout having to use the ugly SAP Frontend...
Anyways, doing something like this with printf would be a pain. Same goes for all 'er' of Perl - 'Extraction and Report'. I use format for log file parsing output, mail body assembling, en fin for all stuff I'm loth to use a templating engine for.
--shmem
_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo. G°\ /
/\_¯/(q /
---------------------------- \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}
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