#NAME

perlform - Perl formats

#DESCRIPTION

Perl has a mechanism to help you generate simple reports and charts. To facilitate this, Perl helps you code up your output page close to how it will look when it's printed. It can keep track of things like how many lines are on a page, what page you're on, when to print page headers, etc. Keywords are borrowed from FORTRAN: format() to declare and write() to execute; see their entries in perlfunc. Fortunately, the layout is much more legible, more like BASIC's PRINT USING statement. Think of it as a poor man's nroff(1).

Formats, like packages and subroutines, are declared rather than executed, so they may occur at any point in your program. (Usually it's best to keep them all together though.) They have their own namespace apart from all the other "types" in Perl. This means that if you have a function named "Foo", it is not the same thing as having a format named "Foo". However, the default name for the format associated with a given filehandle is the same as the name of the filehandle. Thus, the default format for STDOUT is named "STDOUT", and the default format for filehandle TEMP is named "TEMP". They just look the same. They aren't.

Output record formats are declared as follows:

format NAME =
FORMLIST
.

If the name is omitted, format "STDOUT" is defined. A single "." in column 1 is used to terminate a format. FORMLIST consists of a sequence of lines, each of which may be one of three types:

A comment, indicated by putting a '#' in the first column.
A "picture" line giving the format for one output line.
An argument line supplying values to plug into the previous picture line.

Picture lines contain output field definitions, intermingled with literal text. These lines do not undergo any kind of variable interpolation. Field definitions are made up from a set of characters, for starting and extending a field to its desired width. This is the complete set of characters for field definitions:

@    start of regular field
^    start of special field
<    pad character for left justification
|    pad character for centering
>    pad character for right justification
#    pad character for a right-justified numeric field
0    instead of first #: pad number with leading zeroes
.    decimal point within a numeric field
...  terminate a text field, show "..." as truncation evidence
@*   variable width field for a multi-line value
^*   variable width field for next line of a multi-line value
~    suppress line with all fields empty
~~   repeat line until all fields are exhausted

Each field in a picture line starts with either "@" (at) or "^" (caret), indicating what we'll call, respectively, a "regular" or "special" field. The choice of pad characters determines whether a field is textual or numeric. The tilde operators are not part of a field. Let's look at the various possibilities in detail.

#Text Fields

The length of the field is supplied by padding out the field with multiple "<", ">", or "|" characters to specify a non-numeric field with, respectively, left justification, right justification, or centering. For a regular field, the value (up to the first newline) is taken and printed according to the selected justification, truncating excess characters. If you terminate a text field with "...", three dots will be shown if the value is truncated. A special text field may be used to do rudimentary multi-line text block filling; see "Using Fill Mode" for details.

Example:
   format STDOUT =
   @<<<<<<   @||||||   @>>>>>>
   "left",   "middle", "right"
   .
Output:
   left      middle    right

#Numeric Fields

Using "#" as a padding character specifies a numeric field, with right justification. An optional "." defines the position of the decimal point. With a "0" (zero) instead of the first "#", the formatted number will be padded with leading zeroes if necessary. A special numeric field is blanked out if the value is undefined. If the resulting value would exceed the width specified the field is filled with "#" as overflow evidence.

Example:
   format STDOUT =
   @###   @.###   @##.###  @###   @###   ^####
    42,   3.1415,  undef,    0, 10000,   undef
   .
Output:
     42   3.142     0.000     0   ####

#The Field @* for Variable-Width Multi-Line Text

The field "@*" can be used for printing multi-line, nontruncated values; it should (but need not) appear by itself on a line. A final line feed is chomped off, but all other characters are emitted verbatim.

#The Field ^* for Variable-Width One-line-at-a-time Text

Like "@*", this is a variable-width field. The value supplied must be a scalar variable. Perl puts the first line (up to the first "\n") of the text into the field, and then chops off the front of the string so that the next time the variable is referenced, more of the text can be printed. The variable will not be restored.

Example:
   $text = "line 1\nline 2\nline 3";
   format STDOUT =
   Text: ^*
         $text
   ~~    ^*
         $text
   .
Output:
   Text: line 1
         line 2
         line 3

#Specifying Values

The values are specified on the following format line in the same order as the picture fields. The expressions providing the values must be separated by commas. They are all evaluated in a list context before the line is processed, so a single list expression could produce multiple list elements. The expressions may be spread out to more than one line if enclosed in braces. If so, the opening brace must be the first token on the first line. If an expression evaluates to a number with a decimal part, and if the corresponding picture specifies that the decimal part should appear in the output (that is, any picture except multiple "#" characters without an embedded "."), the character used for the decimal point is determined by the current LC_NUMERIC locale if use locale is in effect. This means that, if, for example, the run-time environment happens to specify a German locale, "," will be used instead of the default ".". See perllocale and

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