SPUG: itm 60 in effective perl programming

[Ben Reser]

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 null file handle.  In this case it reads the next line from
the files given on the command line.

But I think their either is a typo in your example or in the book
because that doesn't join the lines in the file:

$ echo 'foo' > test
$ echo 'bar' >> test
$ echo 'baz' >> test
$ wc -l test
      3 test
$ perl -pe 's/\n/" " . <>/e' test
foo bar
baz 

And in fact hangs until you Ctrl+D it if there is an odd number of lines
in the file.  It hangs because the -p creates an implicit loop which
reads from <> and then a second 

Perhaps they meant this:
perl -pe 's/\n/ /' file

tr would probably be moderately better:
perl -pe 'tr/\n/ /'

But I'd prefer the following:
perl -pe 'chomp; $_ .= " "' file

which would be faster.  Here's a quick and dirty comparision of
execution times on a 4.2 GB file.

regex version:
31.06user 10.43system 2:19.48elapsed 29%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+676minor)pagefaults 0swaps

tr version:
30.91user 7.45system 2:02.26elapsed 31%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+651minor)pagefaults 0swaps

chomp version:
20.97user 9.89system 1:45.98elapsed 29%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata
0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+652minor)pagefaults 0swaps

Be forwarned however, it might seem like you could get away with using
chop instead of chomp here becuase you can count on every line having a
line separater.  However, this won't work on Windows where text files
are usually using two characters to separate lines.  chomp works because
it will remove all of the characters that appear in $/ if the are at the
end of the line.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to use the regex version.  So if
what you gave was really what was printed in the book I'd say the book
is wrong.

-- 
Ben Reser <ben at reser.org>
http://ben.reser.org

"Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking."
- H.L. Mencken