Perl Programming/Filehandles

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← Flow control | Modifiers →

1 Read files
- 1.1 Procedural Interface
  - 1.1.1 By globbing file
  - 1.1.2 By line processing
- 1.2 Object Oriented Interface

[edit] Read files

[edit] Procedural Interface

[edit] By globbing file

This method will read the whole file into an array. It will split on the special variable $/

# Create a read-only file handle for foo.txt
open ( my $fh, '<', 'foo.txt' );
 
# Read the lines into the array @lines
my @lines=<$fh>;
 
# Print out the whole array of lines
print @lines;

[edit] By line processing

This method will read the file one line at a time. This will keep memory usage down, but the program will have to poll the hard drive on each iteration.

# Create a read-only file handle for foo.txt
open ( my $fh, '<', 'foo.txt' );
 
# Iterate over each line, saving the line to the scalar variable $line
while ( my $line = <$fh> ) {
 
  # Print out the current line from foo.txt
  print $line;
 
}

[edit] Object Oriented Interface

Using IO::File you can get a more modern object-oriented interface to a perl file handle.

# Include IO::File which will give you the interface
use IO::File;
 
# Create a read-only file handle for foo.txt
my $fh = IO::File->new( 'foo.txt', 'r' );
 
# Iterate over each line, saving the line to the scalar variable $line
while ( my $line = $fh->getline ) {
 
  # Print out the current line from foo.txt
  print $line;
 
}

# Include IO::File which will give you the interface
use IO::File;
 
# Create a read-only file handle for foo.txt
my $fh = IO::File->new( 'foo.txt', 'r' );
 
my @lines = $fh->getlines;
 
# Print out the current line from foo.txt
print $line;