formline - internal function used for formats
formline PICTURE,LIST
This is an internal function used by formats, 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, because an ``@'' character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.
formline() always returns
TRUE. See the perlform manpage for other examples.
If rather than formatting bugs, you encounter substantive content errors in these documents, such as mistakes in the explanations or code, please use the perlbug utility included with the Perl distribution.