Coder's Guild Mailing List

Reading a file into a hash in Perl

Posted by Frank Hale on 1999-03-18

Is there a way to read a file into a hash which the fields extend over
multiple lines? 

I can do it but I have to strip off newline characters and this f's up
the formatting of the data.

Here is the code I have so far but it will only read fields if they
don't have newline characters in them. In other words it will mess up as
soon as it hits a newline character messing the data up in each field.

#!/usr/bin/perl

@fieldList = qw(Index Message);

open(FILE, "<forum_messages.dat");

foreach $line (<FILE>) {
    
    @data{@fieldList} = split(/##/, $line, scalar @fieldList);

    foreach (@fieldList) {
        printf("%10.10s = %s", $_, $data{$_});
    }
    
}

close(FILE);


-- 
From:      Frank Hale
Email:     frankhale@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xxx   
ICQ:       7205161          
Website:   http://www.franksstuff.com

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