Dealing With Records in Perl

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One thing Perl does really well is read in information from a file. There are a couple of useful special variables you can use to neaten up your code when doing this or to alter the default behavior when reading in records.

The first is the special variable $.. $. keeps track of your current record number while iterating through a file. Thus:

while(<FILE>) {
    print "Current line number is $. n";
}

The above example uses the default behavior, which reads in a file line-by-line. This behavior can be altered by setting $/, which is the field separator, set to newline by default. For example, you could set it to read records separated by a semi-colon, instead:

$/ = ";";
while (<FILE>) {
    print;
}

However, bear in mind that changing this variable will affect all code until the program finishes — which might be particularly awkward (and bug-introducing) if you're writing a module that will interact with other code. To avoid this, use the function local, which creates a temporary local variable with the same name as an existing variable:

{
    local $/ = ";";
    while (<FILE>) {
        print;
    }
}

A final note: Bear in mind that $. tracks records, not line numbers. Thus, if you reset $/, $. will increment according to your new record delimiter.

Juliet Kemp has been messing around with Linux systems, for financial reward and otherwise, for about a decade. She is also the author of "Linux System Administration Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach" (Apress, 2009).

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