Programming the Perl DBI

Neat and Tidy Formatting

The DBI features a couple of utility functions that can be used to tidy up strings into a form suitable for easy reading. These two functions are neat() and neat_list() , the former operating on a single scalar value, the latter operating on a list of scalar values.

For example, to use neat() to tidy up some strings, you could write:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#
# ch04/util/neat1: Tests out the DBI::neat() utility function.
#

use DBI;

### Declare some strings to neatify
my $str1 = "Alligator's an extremely neat() and tidy person";
my $str2 = "Oh no\nhe's not!";

### Neatify this first string to a maxlen of 40
print "String: " . DBI::neat( $str1, 40 ) . "\n";

### Neatify the second string to a default maxlen of 400
print "String: " . DBI::neat( $str2 ) . "\n";

### Neatify a number
print "Number: " . DBI::neat( 42 * 9 ) . "\n";

### Neatify an undef
print "Undef: " . DBI::neat( undef ) . "\n";

exit;

which generates the output of:

String: 'Alligator's an extremely neat() and...'
String: 'Oh no
he's not!'
Number: 378
Undef:  undef

demonstrating that string values are quoted,^[41] whereas values known to be numeric are not. The first string has been truncated to the desired length with ... added. Undefined values are recognized and returned as the string undef without quotes.

While the neat() function is handy for single values, the neat_list() function is handy for lists. It simply calls neat() on each element of the referenced list before joining the list of values together ...