There is no limit on the length of a scalar in Perl other than the amount of memory you have. It is possible that it is splitting the newline because you are using a multi-byte character set, or the global variable $/ (input record seperator) was changed in the script, or you are working with binary data. In other words I am guessing that you have the character value 10 (a linefeed) somewhere inside of the string, and it is splitting the string on that.
Rob -----Original Message----- From: Anette Seiler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, March 12, 2002 4:55 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: How long can $_ be? Hi! Is there some limit in how long the contents of the variable $_ can be? The problem I have is following: my script reads a file line by line. These lines are fairly long. As soon as I work with the long lines problems arise. The script chops off the first part of the line. When I print $_ I don't get the whole line, but only the last part . I made several experiments. The first line I gave was 490 characters long, $_ contained the last 233 characters. The string was chopped off at character 257. The second line I gave was 462 characters long, $_ contained the last 205 characters. The string was chopped off at character 257. The third line I gave was 253 characters long, $_ contained the whole 253 characters. Nothing was chopped off. The fourth line I gave was 839 characters long, $_ contained the last 68 characters. The string was chopped off at character 771. I encounter this problem on Solaris machines running Perl 5.005. On Windows with Perl 5.6.1. no such problem was encountered. What could cause the problem? Kind regards Anette Mit freundlichen Grüßen Anette Seiler HBZ-NRW Geschäftsbereich Digitale Bibliothek Tel.: +49-221-40075-196 Fax: +49-221-40075-190 www.hbz-nrw.de email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
