http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=158334


in reply to Look ahead and join if the line begins with a +

Some good solutions presented here - but - experience shows that the area of greatest difficulty in designing working algorithms is in dealing with "edge conditions".

Ask yourself - those who proposed things like

line[-1]
What happens if the first line of the file starts with a continuation character? Sure, this is logically an invalid case, but . . .