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?

In reply to Perl format line breaking, $FORMAT_LINE_BREAK_CHARACTERS apparently ignored by trantorvega

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.