Re: Print a big string formatted and in multiple lines

[haukex]

Hi alen129,

Please see How do I post a question effectively? - please use <code> tags to format not only your code but your data as well.

To convert the string '\n' (that is, a literal backslash followed by the letter n) to a newline (perhaps plus something else), you could do

$Detail =~ s/\\n/\n/g;
# or
$Detail =~ s/\\n/<br>\n/g; # for HTML

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D

[alen129]

Hauke D, The second line did it for me. Thank you so much. where can I learn more about this sort of string formatting?(what keyword do I search for?)

[haukex]

Hi alen129,

s/\\n/<br>\n/g is a search-and-replace regular expression, a good place to start is perlretut and perlrequick.

Interpolation ('\n' vs. "\n" vs. "\\n") is discussed in a few different places, for example a bit in Scalar value constructors and Quote and Quote like Operators.

Also, as mentioned as one of the points in the Basic debugging checklist, it's probably a good habit to get into to use a module like Data::Dumper or Data::Dump to look at the content your variables:

my $Detail = 'Sep 30 2016 8:32AM CHP\nSep 30 2016 8:32AM SANTA ANA\n';
use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Useqq=1;
print Dumper $Detail;
# - or -
use Data::Dump 'dump';
print dump $Detail;

Both will unambiguously show you the content of the string in Perl's syntax, for example "Sep 30 2016 8:32AM CHP\\nSep 30 2016 8:32AM SANTA ANA\\n".

Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D