SPUG: itm 60 in effective perl programming
John W. Krahn
krahnj at telus.net
Thu Feb 24 01:53:45 PST 2005
Tim Maher wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2005 at 11:46:28PM -0800, Florentin Ionescu wrote:
>
>>perl -pe 's/\n/" " . <>/e' file
>>is presented in Effective perl programming as program to
>>join lines from a file. what does it mean <> in this context
>>? - I looked into perlop and perlre but can't figure out haw
>>it works.
>
> <> is the "input operator"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
readline operator
> -- it's like the UNIX shell's "read"
> command, except it loads $_ with the next line of input
IIF it is used in a while loop conditional!
> rather than some other variable.
>
> But IMHO, that's a pretty inscrutable way to join lines. Here's a more
> "scrutable" way, based on the implicit loop (-p), assuming you really
> want a space between each pair of lines as shown above:
>
> perl -wpe 's/\n$/ /;' file # replace newline with space
That replaces *every* newline with a space unlike the OP's example which
replaces every odd numbered newline with a space. Also, the end of line
anchor ($) is superfluous as there is only one newline in every line (unless
you change the Input Record Separator.)
John
--
use Perl;
program
fulfillment
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