Re: [vox-tech] newbie regexp question

["Jay Strauss" <jstrauss@bazillion.MAPScom>]

That was a nice explanation!

But why do you open the file with a "<" sign.  I that so there is no ambiguity
that you are reading the file?


Jay Strauss
jstrauss@bazillion.com
(h) 773.935.5326
(c) 312.617.0264

----- Original Message -----
From: "Micah Cowan" <micah@cowanbox.com>
To: <vox-tech@franz.mother.com>
Sent: Friday, September 29, 2000 12:18 PM
Subject: Re: [vox-tech] newbie regexp question


> On Fri, Sep 29, 2000 at 08:31:34AM -0500, Jay Strauss wrote:
> > Micah,
> >
> > Basic Perl question, in your example:
> >
> > > #!/usr/bin/perl
> > > undef $/; # slurp the file into a scalar
> > > $contents = <>;
> > > $contents =~ /$exactSequence/;
> > > $beforeMatch = $`;
> > > $match = $&;
> > > $afterMatch = $';
> >
> > Since you don't identify the file (I'm not sure where the "<>" will read),
lets
> > say I had a file at /home/jstrauss/FileToBeRead.txt, how would I read an
entire
> > file into the variable?
>
> <> will read from every file provided to it by the command line, or if
> there aren't any, from standard input.
>
> To read in a specific file:
>
> open (FILE, '< /home/jstrauss/FileToBeRead.txt');
> $contents = <FILE>;
> close (FILE);
>
> will do the trick.
>
> >
> > And what does "undef $/;" do?
>
> As the comment says, undeffing $/ will activate "slurp-mode", which
> means when you assign <> to a scalar, you will read the entire file
> into a scalar, instead of only one line.  If you don't want newlines,
> you'll need to get rid of those, perhaps with:
>
> $contents =~ tr/\n//d;
>
> The way it works is, perl always reads one line in from the file when
> you are assigning to a scalar - however, you can change perl's
> definition of a line.  The $/ variable holds the string which perl
> understands to terminate lines in an input file, so if you undef it,
> it won't recognize anything as a line terminator and will read the
> whole file.
>
> The way I did it was rather hackish - a better way to do it is:
>
> $oldValue = $/;
> undef $/;
> ... (do stuff) ...
> $/ = $oldValue;
>
> Ideally placing that last line directly after reading in the file's
> contents, so you don't accidentally screw with other possible file
> reading mechanisms you may be using.
>
> Cheers,
> Micah
>
> >
> > Jay Strauss
> > jstrauss@bazillion.com
> > (h) 773.935.5326
> > (c) 312.617.0264
> >
>