Verifying Date Formats in Perl

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Reading File Contents into an Array

Listing C.24 demonstrates how to read in ('slurp') an entire file into an array with a single Perl command.

Listing C.24 arrayFile1.pl

my($fileName)    = "somedata.txt"; my($currentLine) = ""; my($index)       = 0; my(@fileContents); open(INPUT, "<$fileName") || die "Cannot open $fileName: $!\n"; (@fileContents) = <INPUT>; foreach $index (0..$#fileContents) {    $currentLine = $fileContents[$index];    print "$currentLine"; }

Remarks

You can invoke the Perl script arrayFile1.pl from the command line as follows,

perl -w arrayFile1.pl

and the output will be as follows:

# this is a comment line Jones:Tom:1000 Smith:Ann:2000 Smith:Bill:3000

This technique is useful when you want to minimize the amount of time that a file is open (for whatever reason). Since the array containing the file contents will be in main memory, you can process the array contents much faster than the line-by-line approach that was used in earlier examples.

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