formline
- formline PICTURE,LIST
This is an internal function used by
format
s, though you may call it, too. It formats (see perlform) 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 awrite
is done, the contents of$^A
are written to some filehandle. You could also read$^A
and then set$^A
back to""
. Note that a format typically does oneformline
per line of form, but theformline
function itself doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the PICTURE. This means that the~
and~~
tokens treat the entire PICTURE as a single line. You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single record format, just like theformat
compiler.Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, because an
@
character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.formline
always returns true. See perlform for other examples.If you are trying to use this instead of
write
to capture the output, you may find it easier to open a filehandle to a scalar (open $fh, ">", \$output
) and write to that instead.