Re: Reading a text file collapsing line continuations

[kennethk]

I can repeat your issue with my Linux box (and get good behavior w/ AS 5.8.8 under Windows). Based upon what I see in my debugger, you are having a scoping issue. Essentially, every iteration of your while loop reinitializes $line as per your my statement. My guess is they modified the scoping behavior in 5.10.0, which fixes this particular issue. You can avoid the problem with:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings;

my $line;
while (defined($line = <DATA>) )
{
    chomp $line;                        # line 7
    if ($line =~ s/\\$//)               # line 8
    {
        $line .= <DATA>;
        redo unless eof(DATA);
    }
    print "LINE: '$line'\n";
}

__DATA__
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 4 \
 4 4 \
  4 4
5 5

Update:Regarding your comment

I would expect that the while loop wouldn't run if there was an undefined line - so I'm unclear on why the chomp is giving the uninitialized variable warning.

you should check out the documentation to see why the original developer used a redo in place of a next.