breaking a line on printing

[hotshot]

I'm sure someone has answered this already (I couldn't find it in the history), but here goes (a stupid one i'm sure):
How do I use the print command in a way that my code will be more organized, for example:

If i want to print a long (more then a row) sentence then my code looks ugly, something like this:

print "Once upon a time there was a little programmer that asked to ma
+ny questions.\nToday his question was realy a stupd one.\nand so on a
+nd on...";
if ($bla eq 'test') {
  ....;
}

and you can see this looks ugly. is there a line seperator or something else to handle these situation of long lines of code (actually not only in print command)?

Thanks

Hotshot

[tachyon]

You can do any of these:

# using a heredoc

print <<TEXT;
Once upon a time there was a little programmer that asked to many ques
+tions.
Today his question was realy a stupd one.
and so on and on...
TEXT

# using literal newlines in the text

print 'Once upon a time there was a little programmer that asked to ma
+ny questions.
Today his question was realy a stupd one.
and so on and on...
';

# using the comma operator

print "Once upon a time there was a little programmer that asked to ma
+ny questions.\n",
      "Today his question was realy a stupd one\n",
      "and so on and on...\n";

# using the concatenation operator

print "Once upon a time there was a little programmer that asked to ma
+ny questions.\n" .
      "Today his question was realy a stupd one\n" .
      "and so on and on...\n";

# using a custom sub. declare prototype so we can use it as
# a bareword. We use ^\n to mark our line wraps and remove 
# the leading whitespace on the next line. We use a regex
# to remove these and presto.....
sub wrap;
print wrap "Once upon a time there was a little programmer ^
            that asked to many questions.\nToday his question ^
            was realy a stupd one\nand so on and on...\n";

sub wrap {
    $text = shift;
    $text =~ s/\^\n\s*//g;
  return $text;
}

Update

You can even define your own custom print function that does the (un)wrap bit for you:

sub printw;

$interpolate = "Interpolate this\n";
$comma = "We can use the comma operator\n";
@ary = qw (this_ is_ an_ array);

printw "Once upon a time there was a little programmer ^
        that asked to many questions.\nToday his question ^
        was realy a stupd one\nand so on and on...\n^
        $interpolate^
        ", $comma, @ary;

sub printw {
    my @text = @_;
    s/\^\n\s*//g, print for @text;
}

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

[Tyke]

Have you looked at the 'heredoc' notation?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

print <<_END_;
Once upon a time there was a little programmer that asked too many que
+stions.
Today his question wasn't realy a stupid one.
And so on and on..
_END_

Not a perfect solution with regards to code indentation, but still very useful

[demerphq]

There are a few variations of Bikers answer
• Set $, to be a newline (or use join explicitly as suits your taste and style), also set $\ to a newline.

  { # setting $, $\ should be done in a block with local
      local $\="\n";
      {
         local $,="\n";
         print "These",
               "Are",
               "Seperate",
               "lines";
      }
      print join ("\n",
                  "As",
                  "Are",
                  "These");
  }
  

• Use a here doc. (Consult the docs, here docs can be a bit tricky.)

  print <<END_OF_TEXT;
  These
  are
  seperate
  lines
  END_OF_TEXT
  

Yves / DeMerphq
--
This space for rent.

[webadept]

All of the above are great.. I didn't notice anyone using my favorite

print qq` This is text and I want to 
print this text on many lines as I can with "quotes and without quotes
+" .. 
`;

I use that for a lot of HTML stuff and such things. That's not a single quote or apostorphe there.. is the .. heck I don't really know what its called.. its on the same key as the ~ is but I believe you can use just about anything as long as that something is not inside the text you are using.

Oh.. and it holds formating.. so watch your line breaks. Try it out, you'll see what I mean.

hope that helps

Glenn H.

[friedo]

That's a backtick.

[mt2k]

a backtick?? Oh no! I hate ticks, burn it off, burn it off!!
And as for webadept's answer, that is also one of my favorites. I generally use something like

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

print qq|Content-type: text/html\n
<html>
<head>
<title>Yeah Yeah</title>
</head>
<!-- More HTML stuff here, etc... -->

Oh looky here, a whatever this character is called \|
|;

As long as you backslash any |'s in the text you'll be fine (and I don't think your output contains many if any of these...)

If you are outputting strings that contain a lot of strange characters, I'd definitely suggest use heredocs, especially if you are outputting very long HTML documents. For example:

print <<'YayIAmDone';
look at this text. lots of non-alphanumeric characters in this print s
+tatement! 8)^404`76`5`65^%!^%^@éA¿º¿ªÑñç¦ and we don't even have to l
+ook for anything to backslash! !$#!#!1~!````~!~!~21&$3(&6(*7_*(+|}|]{
+]{]":':?,,?<

YayIAmDone

exit;

[Biker]

What you're really asking for is a way to define a quoted string on several lines.

As far as I'm aware there is no direct way of doing this. (Like in VB or some such.) You could take a different approach:

print
"This is a long string\n".
"on more than one\n".
"line\n";

This implies that perl will have to do the concatenation, which 'feels wrong'. But the Perl interpreter will optimize this during the compilation phase and create one long string to be printed.



---

Everything will go worng!

[ellem]

You can do all of the wonderful things everyone has already suggested BUT if I read you question correctly you are concerned that your code is ugly... (strange for a Perl programmer.. but OK =) )


print "I want this on one line
I want this on another line
and finally put this here on yeat another line.\n"

It's practically WYSIWYG. Just hit enter at the end of what you're doing.
--
[e-mail]
There's more than one way to do it, but only some of them actually work.

[MAXOMENOS]

I'm surprised more people haven't suggested this approach. I see people do this all the time, without ill effects. Has anyone seen this *not* work?

[abaxaba]

There have been some good suggestions here, but no one has mentioned my particular favorite, which I use especially with html output.
I push everything onto an array, then just dump the array. This seems to work for me for a couple of reasons:
1. Format whitespace, easier readability.
2. Pass array ref around to different subs, to build up output string in a modular format, without worrying about return values:

#!perl
main();
sub main
{
    my @output;
    push (@output, "Here is something to print out\n",
                   "Here is yet another line\n");
    extra(\@output);
    print @output;
}
sub extra
{
    my $resRef = shift;
    push (@$resRef, "Here is an extra line\n");
}         
exit 0;

[code_drifter]

I just hit Enter rather than using the "\n". Perl will use the literal keystroke of the enter key.