reading and assigning files to variables

[perlone]

Hi,

I have a file called news.txt and it contains like this:

1. Message 1
2. Message 2

open(F, "news.txt"
@news= <F>;
close(F);

I want to assign the whole message to a variable. So I did the following:

foreach $message (@news) {
$news = qq($message);
}

But the variable $news is reading only the first line. But I want to read the whole text and assign them to one
variable which is $news. Any ideas?

-Aaron

 

[vcherubini]

Arron:

Try this:

[tt]
foreach $message (@news) {
$news .= $message;
}
[/tt]

I think that is what you mean.

The . is the concatenation symbol.

Hope this helps,

-Vic vic cherubini
vikter@epicsoftware.com

http://www.epicsoftware.com

====
Knows: Perl, HTML, JavScript, C/C++, PHP, Flash, Director
====

 

[perlone]

Thanks alot, vcherubini. It' works like a charm

 

[perlone]

Little problem: It works but it displays like this:

Justing Testing out the News Board! Server will reset 12:00 ever Zones.

But I want them to displays each message in each new lines like this:

Justing Testing out the News Board!
Server will reset 12:00 ever Zones.

This is also how it looks inside the news.txt. Do you know how to display each them in new line? I did tried perl's &quot;\n&quot; but it didn't quite worked.

-Aaron

 

[P3rL]

Try this

foreach $message (@news) {
$news .= $message;
$news .= &quot;\n&quot;;
}

 

[sophisticate]

There are two good ways to do this, neither of which includes loops or the (expensive) concatenation operator.

my $news = join '',<F>;

or

undef $/;
my $news = <F>;
$/ = &quot;\n&quot;;

The first method is the more extensible (the '' can be changed to <BR> if you want to keep line breaks in web output). The second method is faster.

Hope this helps,

brendanc@icehouse.net

 

[vcherubini]

sophisticate:

If the news.txt file contained the following text:
[tt]
Justing Testing out the News Board!
Server will reset 12:00 ever Zones.
[/tt]

Wouldn't:
[tt]my $news = <F>;[tt]
Work just the same?

I tried it and it worked on my Activestate version of Perl.
Just wondering?
-Vic

vic cherubini
vikter@epicsoftware.com

http://www.epicsoftware.com

====
Knows: Perl, HTML, JavScript, C/C++, PHP, Flash, Director
====

 

[sophisticate]

It shouldn't. What should happen is that you would get the first line of the file instead of the whole thing.

The $/ special variable is the record separator (typicall equal to a newline) which is what a filehandle in list context is divided with... So, if you undef the $/ variable and read the filehandle, there's nothing to split the array and everything gets assigned to the first element... Then you can safely assign that element to a scalar.

Hope this helps,

brendanc@icehouse.net

 

[perlone]

neither works :-(

 

[sophisticate]

Make sure that you have those statements between the open(F,) and close(F) statements. If you've already closed the filehandle, neither of the options I presented will work.

brendanc@icehouse.net

 

[perlone]

I did the following:


open(F, &quot;$basedir/$email/news.cgi&quot;
@news = <F>;
foreach $message (@news) {
$news .= $message;
$news .= &quot;\n&quot;;
}
close(F);

 

[perlone]

It works but the new line thing is not working at all (&quot;\n&quot;

 

[P3rL]

If you like you can send me your code ill be happy to look at it and give it a try, ill be glad to spare a few minutes to help you.

PS. Send me a example data file as well to make things easier.

ilija_b@hotmail.com