Peter gave some good examples, so I shortened this to supplement his
suggestions.
I prefer to determine what the end-of-line (eol) "character" is using
something less slippery than \r and \n. In Perl, \n is the native eol
for the OS that Perl is executing under, so it could any of the \n, \r,
\r\n, etc., constructs.
Instead, use the octal characters, which for this are:
Mac CR (Carriage Return) "\015"
UNIX, Linux, VMS LF (Line Feed) "\012"
Win CRLF "\015\012"
BTW, many apps in Mac OS X (Excel, Filemaker Pro) continue to use the
eol used in OS 9 and before (CR), not the UNIX eol (LF).
Here's my favorite way to get the eol and convert it to native, no
matter what's in the original file (at least in the popular OSes):
$text =~ s/(\015?\012|\015)/\n/gs;
You could also specify what you want, if that isn't simply the native
eol:
my $new_eol = "\015"; # or "\012" or "\015\012"
$text =~ s/(\015?\012|\015)/$new_eol/gs;
If the file is large, then you may need to use a heuristic (that is,
test some of the text trying to detect a pattern), as Doug suggests,
testing the first x characters of the file to find one of the above eol
constructs, and then seeing whether it shows up again, and then backing
up and processing the whole file. Or use the look-ahead/behind
approaches that Peter suggests.
1;
- Bruce
__bruce__van_allen__santa_cruz__ca__
