Re^2: A refactoring trap

The second while however, will stop as soon as it finds an empty line

Just to test your assertion:

while (my $line = <DATA>) {print $line}; 
__DATA__
one

two
three

four
[download]

results in

one

two
three

four

It seems that empty lines don't break the loop at all.

Comment on Re^2: A refactoring trap Download Code

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Re^3: A refactoring trap by redlemon (Hermit) on Aug 17, 2005 at 08:14 UTC
Hmmm, you're right. It doesn't break. The reason is that blank lines are not truely blank, of course. You're saved by the fact that a blank line still contains the "\n". -- Lyon	[reply]
Re^4: A refactoring trap by lidden (Curate) on Aug 17, 2005 at 09:53 UTC
No it still works with chomp: `while(chomp (my $line = <DATA>)){` [download] At least with newer perl versions. Tried with perl5.8.6.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: A refactoring trap by revdiablo (Prior) on Aug 17, 2005 at 20:11 UTC
No it still works with chomp To understand why this works, take a look at the return value for chomp. Hint: it's not the string with newlines missing. The problem with `while (my $line = <DATA>) {}` is real, it's just obscure. As hinted, it only happens when you get a line with a false value and no newline. Sometimes this happens at the end of a file. Sometimes it happens for other reasons. It usually doesn't cause any actual problems, but certainly is something to look out for.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^6: A refactoring trap by adrianh (Chancellor) on Aug 18, 2005 at 11:46 UTC
Re^7: A refactoring trap by revdiablo (Prior) on Aug 18, 2005 at 15:57 UTC
Re^5: A refactoring trap by !1 (Hermit) on Aug 17, 2005 at 18:05 UTC
With this method you'll never be able to loop through the last line.	[reply]