From perldata:

The two control characters ^D and ^Z, and the tokens __END__ and __DATA__ may be used to indicate the logical end of the script before the actual end of file. Any following text is ignored.

Text after __DATA__ but may be read via the filehandle "PACKNAME::DATA", where "PACKNAME" is the package that was current when the __DATA__ token was encountered. The filehandle is left open pointing to the contents after __DATA__. It is the program's responsibility to "close DATA" when it is done reading from it. For compatibility with older scripts written before __DATA__ was introduced, __END__ behaves like __DATA__ in the toplevel script (but not in files loaded with "require" or "do") and leaves the remaining contents of the file accessible via "main::DATA".

See SelfLoader for more description of __DATA__, and an example of its use. Note that you cannot read from the DATA filehandle in a BEGIN block: the BEGIN block is executed as soon as it is seen (during compilation), at which point the corresponding __DATA__ (or __END__) token has not yet been seen.

After Compline,
Zaxo

I can't find a reference to __DATA__ in the docs. I know its there somehere. Maybe someone else will post one.

Essentially, you can use <DATA> as a file handle that you don't need to open to access anything after the __DATA__ marker at the end of your source file, __END__ works too, but has caveats when used with modules I was informed recently.

It's very useful for testing and demo purposes. You can even have multiple embedded and even writable files using Damian Conway's Inline::Files, I don't think they would be useful for your purposes here though.

..and remember there are a lot of things monks are supposed to be but lazy is not one of them

perldoc perldata, about halfway down. Also, in the camel on pages 68 and 660.

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';
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