Reading in a file not recognizing lines

[bradcathey]

Fellow Monasterians,

I've done this before, but not often. Normally, this...

open (FILE, "somefile.txt") or die;
my @records = <FILE>;
close(FILE);

OR

my @records;
open (FILE, "somefile.txt") or die;
while (<FILE>) {
   push @records, $_;
}
close(FILE);

...renders a nice array of one line per element.

Today, the above placed the entire file of 10 lines into one element. I hex-dumped the file and noted the line endings were 0D, but I'm not sure what they should be.

To get it to work, I had to do this...

my @records = split(/\r/,$records);

Has this something to do with how the text file was saved? Thanks!

[Fletch]

Mac OS (well, at least older Mac OS) use(s|d) \x0d to represent end of line, so your file probably came from there or hopped through there without proper translation. You could:

• re-fetch the file, this time telling whatever mechanism you're using to treat it as a text file (e.g. FTP in ASCII mode)
• set $/ to \x0D
• use split as you've done
• use the *NIX tr utility to translate the line endings
• use the perl -i -pe equivalent of the above to do the same

Also: see perlport for the section on "Newlines".

[bradcathey]

Fetch, thanks. Great insight: was using an old OS9 program to generate tab-delimited conversion for transport to web.

Embarrassingly, I've never worked with $/. Thanks for the nudge.

[bobf]

I think Fletch nailed it. I ran into a situation a while ago where a data file was created on a Mac (with \r line endings) but it was then moved to a Windows machine (which expected \r\n line endings). In Newlines: reading files that were created on other platforms I asked our fellow monks for suggestions, and got a lot of great responses. Among them were tips to look at File::LocalizeNewlines and binmode.

[ioannis]

Or use the PerlIO layer. The code bellow is fof MS-DOS files, not sure if a layer exists for OSX.

use PerlIO ;
open F, '<:crlf', 'data' ;

;

[jesuashok]

Hi

The '\r' is discussed already in Why chomp() is not considering carriage-return