NAME

formline - internal function used for formats


SYNOPSIS

formline PICTURE, LIST


DESCRIPTION

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.