Re: [MacPerl] Would like suggestion.

[Ronald J Kimball <rjk@linguist.dartmouth.edu>]

On Mon, Dec 04, 2000 at 10:26:37PM -0700, Michael Eggleston wrote:
> > I have a very large text file with about 90,000 lines in it. A vast
> > majority of the lines are blank. (In case anyone is interested, it was
> > created with the bookmanager print-to-file command)
> > 
> > My question involves is this: When 3 (or "N") or more blank lines are
> > found, delete them. Leaving 2 in their place, and possibly a marker.
> 
> Here is a very simple way of doing it, however it might be a memory hog:
> 
> open (TEXT, "MyFile.file");     ### This opesn up the file.
> my @Lines = <TEXT>;             ### This sticks it into an array.
> close TEXT;                     ### This closes the file.

Certainly, having two copies of the file will be more of a memory hog than
having one:

> $TheFile = join ('', @Lines);   ### This makes that array into a scalar value.


If you want to read the entire file into a scalar, then read it directly
into a scalar:

open(TEXT, $file) or die "Can't open $file: $!\n";
# check the return value from open()!
{
  local $/;   # file slurp mode
  $text = <TEXT>;
}

# ...


Ronald

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