Achieving something similar to <<EOQ

legend has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a function that takes input as follows:

my $query = dbQuery( <<EOQ );
SUBJECT="ELECTRONICS"
AUTHOR="JOHN"
EOQ
[download]

If I want to put this into another file, how would I let the function take this value? I mean, suppose that I place

SUBJECT="ELECTRONICS"
AUTHOR="JOHN"
[download]

into a different file,say filter.txt and supply it from command line as perl <filename> filter.txt, how would I make the program work? Can someone help me out please?

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Re: Achieving something similar to <<EOQ by grinder (Bishop) on Mar 08, 2008 at 22:01 UTC
Uh... by reading the file? `my $query = dbQuery( do{local $/ = undef; open my $in, shift and <$in>} );` [download] You might want to toss in a bit of error-checking in case the file doesn't exists, or the program lacks the privileges to read it. • another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Achieving something similar to <<EOQ by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 08, 2008 at 22:01 UTC
You need to read that text into a variable and pass that variable to the function. I suggest reading the documentation for open, readline, and possibly chomp.	[reply]
Re: Achieving something similar to <<EOQ by duelafn (Parson) on Mar 09, 2008 at 02:54 UTC
Most friendly syntax would define a sub `sub cat { my ($mode, $f) = ("<", @_); open my $F, $mode, $f or die "Can't open $f for reading: $!"; local $/ = undef; return scalar <$F>; }` [download] See also File::Slurp Good Day, Dean	[reply] [d/l]