formline

NAME

formline - internal function used for formats


SYNOPSIS

formline PICTURE, LIST


DESCRIPTION

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.