Name
formline
Synopsis
formline picture, variables
Internal function used by formats, although you may
also call it. It formats a list of values
(variables) according to the contents
of picture, placing the output into the
format output accumulator, $^A.
When a write is done, the
contents of $^A are written to
a filehandle, but you can also read $^A yourself and 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. Thus, you may
need to use multiple formlines to implement a single-record
format, such as the format compiler.
Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture,
since an @ character may be
taken to mean the beginning of an array name. formline always returns true. See Chapter 4 for more
information.