Reference: formline
Author: Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour & Nathan Patwardhan
Date: 1999-07-02T01:35:08Z

#

| Chapter 5 Function Reference |

## formline

    formline picture, variables

Internal function used by formats, although you may also call it. It formats a list of values (variables) according to the contents of picture, placing the output into the format output accumulator, `$^A`. When a `write` is done, the contents of `$^A` are written to some filehandle, but you could also read `$^A` yourself and set `$^A` back to `""`. Note that a format typically does one `formline` per line of form, but the `formline` function itself doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the picture. This means that the `~` and `~~` tokens will treat the entire picture as a single line. Thus, you may need to use multiple formlines to implement a single record-format, like the format compiler.

Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, since an `@` character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name. `formline` always returns true. See Section 4.10, "Formats" in Chapter 4 for more information.

Reference: fork |  | Reference: getc