[ILUG] [ot] Perl question

[Justin Mason]

Lee Hosty said:

> what I'm doing is sucking in a webpage using LWP off a site thats run on a
> mac ... 
> 
> I dump this to a file ... then I open this file and want to seperate the
> lines in it ... the @array seems to read it in as one element ... so
> chomp() wont work and the only way I can think of to seperate it is by
> splitting it up using the newline element ... \n doesnt work, nor \r\n ...
> I've tried a few combinations of \f \n and \r but still no joy ...

I can't remember the newline sep variable (see man perlvar), but a quick
way to do it would be:

	$blob = join ('', <HANDLE>);
	@lines = split (/[\r\n]+/, $blob);

that'll handle any platform's line-endings and split it into lines.
However multiple blank lines will be ignored with this method, c'est la
vie.

To specifically handle Mac line endings, use this:

	@lines = split (/\r/, $blob);

Macs use \r, windoze uses \r\n, and UNIX is \n.


BTW regarding RedHat's printfilter stuff -- (a) it shouldn't be in the
/var/spool/lpd directory anyway for security reasons and (b) it should
DEFINITELY not be a shell script of all things.  That's definitely the
kind of thing that they should have done an rpm on, i.e. come up with a
new, well-designed, well-implemented utility.  In fact, I'd seen two
half-built implementations of the same thing in C by that point, so they
should just have adopted one of those!!

--j.