[MacPerl] Code cleaning and questions

[Robert Pollard <robpoll1@bellsouth.net>]

Hello everyone,

I have a snippet of code I would like to ask questions about.  I am a
newbie so I won't even raise your brainwave level far above a coma.
I did this little bit of code to check the contents of a file for any
strange characters.  The file was causing a freeze and I thought there
may be something odd in it.  It turned out there wasn't but I have some
questions about it.

open(SOURCE, '<Robert:Desktop Folder:Addresses') or die;
open(DEST, '>Robert:Desktop Folder:Addresses.clean') or die;
1)   Does the open command always read the whole file in.  This is an
interesting syntax because what this did was to put the whole contents
of a file line by line into an array.  What if my text were very long
paragraphs and exceeded the maximum character limit of the variable for
each element?
   @line = <SOURCE>;

2)  Why do I need to chomp.  The program ran fine and put everything
aout like it was suppose to.  I believe this is for stripping the CRs at
the end of the line?
   #chomp($line);
print "@line\n";
foreach $line (@line) {
   ($Name, $Phone, $Address, $Type) = split(/\t/, $line);  # This cool.
I would use this before I would allow the split to assign each line
# to different elements in the array.  In the importation of records,
this seems to be the best way to write to arrays in row/column fashion.

3)   Here I didn't have to use the angle brackets around the
filehandle.  If I did it seemed to refer to the whole file.  Without
them, it allows whatever you want to put out.  As in this case I was
able to put out a whole line at a time.
   print DEST $line;
   print("The name is $Name.\n");
# This is where I convert each character to the ascii representation.
   print("The ascii representation is:\n");
   for ($i=1;$i <= length($line);$i++) {
      $num = ord(substr($line, $i, 1));
      print("$num,");
      if ($num > 127) {
        print ("\n\nW A R N I N I N G -- ASCII value exceeds 127\n\n");
      }
   }
   print("\n");
}
close(SOURCE);
close(DEST);
4)   Could you guys give me any tips/hints on code optimization?

Thanks for taking time.

Robert Pollard


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