[Chapter 3] 3.2.42 formline
Author: Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Randal L. Schwartz
Date: 1999-07-02T01:49:45Z

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| Chapter 3 Functions |

### 3.2.42 formline

    formline PICTURE, LIST

This is an internal function used by formats, although you may also call it. It formats a list of values according to the contents of `PICTURE`, placing the output into the format output accumulator, $^A. Eventually, when a write is done, the contents of $^A are written to some filehandle, but you could also read $^A yourself and then 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. You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single record-format, just 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 "Formats" in Chapter 2 for other examples.

3.2.41 format |  | 3.2.43 getc