formline
formline - internal function used for formats
formline PICTURE, LIST
This is an internal function used by
format
s, though you may call it
too. It formats (see
the perlform manpage
) a list of values according to the
contents of PICTURE, placing the output into the format output
accumulator,
$^
A
(or
$ACCUMULATOR
in English).
Eventually, when a
write()
is done, the contents of
$^
A
are written to some filehandle, but you could also read
$^
A
yourself and then set
$^
A
back to ``''. Note that a format typically
does one
formline()
per line of form, but the
formline()
function itself
doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the PICTURE. This means
that the ~ and ~~ tokens will treat the entire PICTURE as a single line.
You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single
record format, just like the format compiler.
Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, since an ``@''
character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.
formline()
always returns TRUE. See
the perlform manpage
for other examples.