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 Gr��en Anette Seiler HBZ-NRW Gesch�ftsbereich 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]
