Re: How to Read Files? [was: Re: learning perl 3rd vs 4th]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 1:29 AM, AndrewMcHorney <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hello
>
> The spec does not allow for carriage returns or line feeds making it a long
> line. Is there a way to read "x" number of bytes?
snip

Take a look at the the record separator ($/) variable*.  You can set
it to a reference to a number and it will cause the <> operator to
read that number of bytes:

$/ = \4096; #read 4k at a time
while (my $block = <>) {
    #do stuff with 4k block
}

* perldoc perlvar or http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html#$/
-- 
Chas. Owens
wonkden.net
The most important skill a programmer can have is the ability to read.