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

Dear Monks, I have a list which I need to print to a file. The thing is that I want every line to have 80 characters BUT, I dont want to chop the items in my list. For example, if I print an item and now I'm at column 77 and the next item is 5 characters long, I want to continue printing at the beginning of the next line. Example, lets say that my limit is column 10 (10 characters): 
my list = (abcd efghi jkl mnop qrst uvwxyz)
abcd efghi
jkl mnop
qrst
uvwxyz

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I didnt exceed beyond column 10. Can you please advise? Thanks!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Print to file options (Text::Wrap)
by toolic (Bishop) on Jan 08, 2009 at 18:16 UTC
    The core module Text::Wrap seems to do what you want: 
    use strict;
use warnings;
use Text::Wrap;

$Text::Wrap::columns = 11;
my $list = 'abcd efghi jkl mnop qrst uvwxyz';
print wrap('', '', $list);
print "\n";

__END__
abcd efghi
jkl mnop
qrst
uvwxyz

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Re: Print to file options
by lostjimmy (Chaplain) on Jan 08, 2009 at 20:40 UTC
    Just for fun and because I feel like procrastinating... 
    sub print_wrap {
    my ($wrap_len, @list) = @_;

    my $pos = 0;
    for my $item (@list) {
        my $len = length $item;
        if ($len + $pos > $wrap_len) {
            print "\n";
            $pos = 0;
        }
        print "$item ";
        $pos += $len + 1;
    }
}

my @list = qw/abcd efghi jkl mnop qrst uvwxyz/;
print_wrap 10, @list;

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