Hello to everyone. In the last hour I've been trying to format the contents of a file using Perl formats, with no success. A brief example:

I example

my $text = "line 1\0line 2\0line 3";
IO::Handle->format_line_break_characters("\0");
format STDOUT =
Text: ^*
      $text
~~    ^*
      $text
.
write;
[download]

Output:

Text: line 1line 2line 3
[download]

II example

my $text = "line 1\nline 2\nline 3";
IO::Handle->format_line_break_characters("\0");
format STDOUT =
Text: ^*
      $text
~~    ^*
      $text
.
write;
[download]

Output:

Text: line 1
      line 2
      line 3
[download]

III example

my $text = "line 1\nline 2\nline 3";
####IO::Handle->format_line_break_characters("\0");
format STDOUT =
Text: ^*
      $text
~~    ^*
      $text
.
write;
[download]

Output:

Text: line 1
      line 2
      line 3
[download]

Taken straight from the perlform man page "The Field ^* for Variable-Width One-line-at-a-time Text" paragraph.

According to the "Using Fill Mode" paragraph, unless I've misunderstood the context, changing the $FORMAT_LINE_BREAK_CHARACTERS or $: variable should change the characters used for line-breaking.

In the first two examples above the variable is correctly set to "\0", instead of its default value " \n-", but that doesn't appear to make lines in the output break on anything other than "\n".

Any ideas? Any obvious misunderstandings on my part?