in reply to Text Processing

I just recently discovered some functions that are good for this sort of thing. seek() and tell(). tell(FILE) will return your current position in the file FILE, and seek(FILE, $n, 0) will send you to the location in FILE stored in $n. Use them like this: 
# open your file
$top_of_file = tell(FILE);
# go fetch your variable
seek(FILE, $top_of_file, 0);
# now you're back at the top

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They're handy in other situations, too. You can tell() any number of positions in the file, and go back to them at will. I bet there's a JAPH in that concept somewhere...

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Re: Re: Text Processing
by arturo (Vicar) on Apr 21, 2001 at 00:55 UTC

    Silly ol' me forgot about tell in my response (I used that inelegant length thing). Oh well; I just wanted to register the caveat that you must read in the first line *before* you do the call to tell, otherwise you get the uninformative result 0.

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      But isn't that the very beginning of the file? Or is that not where we want to be?

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        Well, if you did, then why bother making the function call? =)

        My understanding is that the original poster (gah, forget the name, sorry) wants to print out a new first line, then keep every line thereafter. I was shoehorning it into my framework.

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