Array whitespace

[jgiller]

Hi,

open PASSWD, "ypcat passwd|";
my @nis_passwd=<PASSWD>;
close PASSWD;
print "@nis_passwd";

gets...
entry1:jfduwrn##:etc etc
problem is each subsequent line has one whitespace character. entry2:sdvuur294:etc etc
and so on. HATE THE WHITESPACE!
I am doing something wrong? Can I remove this whitespace cleanly? I need to write the data back to the passwd file so I need a clean file. Thanks! Joe

[hardburn]

When you put a list into a string, it's concatnated with a space inbetween each list entry. Remove the quotes around the array, and then set $, (as documented in [perldoc://perlvar]).

[Belgarion]

Are you simply trying to print the output of the ypcat command? If so, try the following code:

open PASSWD, "ypcat passwd|";
while (<PASSWD>) {
  print;
}
close PASSWD;

Your current code is stringifying a list which does something like:

join(' ', @list);

One final answer, if you change your last line to:

print @nis_passwd;

(notice without the double quotes), the extra space will be removed.

[davido]

The special variable $" determines what character(s) will be used to join array elements when they're interpolated into a double-quoted string.

Consider the following example:

my @array = qw/1 2 3 4 5/;
print "@array\n";
{
    local $" = "\n";
    print "@array\n";
}
{
    local $" = " see perlvar ";
    print "@array\n";
}
{
    local $" = "";
    print "@array\n";
}
__OUTPUT__
1 2 3 4 5
1
2
3
4
5
1 see perlvar 2 see perlvar 3 see perlvar 4 see perlvar 5
12345

Hope this helps!