[Omaha.pm] FWD: FIXME, July 2001

[Daniel Linder]

On Nov 21, 2006, at 8:49 AM, Daniel Linder wrote:
> So, If I read it right, this causes the next line to continue
> reading from the file $readfh, and put all characters up to but
> not including four 'pipe' symbols, right?

On Sun, December 3, 2006 12:03, Jay Hannah wrote:
> Exactly. We have a vendor sending us gobs of ASCII goo and in some
> cases the delimiter in a constant ASCII stream is '||||'. Fun, huh? :)

Later, Daniel Linder wrote:
> If I understand this, the kicker here is that the "\n" characters
> are also placed into the $errmsg variable.

Later, Jay Hannah wrote:
> They never send us "\n" characters. It's a 1 line stream of ASCII goo
> they send for months and months on end.
>
> Oh... On your hypothetical I'd have to write a little test program to
> see if you're right or not. :)  Want me to do that?

No need, I did it here:
$ cat -n TestData
     1  This is a test||||This is a second test||||This
     2  is a
     3  test again||||This is the last test

$ cat -n ParseTestData.pl
     1  #!perl
     2  $/ = '||||';
     3  printf ("Got a line: %s\n",$_) while (<>) ;

$ perl ParseTestData.pl < TestData
Got a line: This is a test||||
Got a line: This is a second test||||
Got a line: This
is a
test again||||
Got a line: This is the last test

So, it appears that the "$/" variable does keep the \n characters and
doesn't treat them as special anymore.

Dan

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