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

OK, after having asked about Placement of $~ or $FORMAT_NAME I've learnt somethingabout select(), but also that I was asking the wrong question.

I have a program that a naughty user can run and which uses format to produce a list of his or her acts of naughtiness on the console. Strangely, naughty users don't seem to run this program themselves very often. So I would like to run it myself and, if I feel that the user has been sufficiently naughty, send him or her the output of the program in an email.

For this I would like to able to print the formatted data either to the console or to a string. I could then pass the string as a message body to some thing like MIME::Lite. I can do the former, but for the latter the best I can come up with would be to write to a file and then read the contents of the file to a string.

Is there a less clunky alternative?

Thanks,

loris

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Re: Writing formatted text to a string?
by JavaFan (Canon) on May 16, 2011 at 12:43 UTC 
    open my $fh, ">", \my $string_to_write_to or die "...";

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[d/l]

      Just to remind myself: The backslash in open($fh, '>', \$variable) allows the filehandle to be opened to an "in memory" file held in a scalar. See open.

      Update:

      Here is my working example:

      #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use English qw( -no_match_vars );
use Getopt::Long;

my $in_memory;
GetOptions('in_memory|i' => \$in_memory,
          );

my $greeting = "Hello World!";

format BLAH =
Greeting: @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
$greeting
.

my $fh;
my $message;

if (defined($in_memory)) {
    open $fh, '>', \$message or die "Couldn't open for writing: $!";
} else {
    $fh = *STDOUT;
}

select($fh);
$FORMAT_NAME = 'BLAH';
write();
select(STDOUT);

if (defined($in_memory)) {
    print "Message written to in memory variable:\n";
    print "$message";
    close($fh);
}

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      loris

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[d/l]

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