$^A
(or $ACCUMULATOR
in English). 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, because an ``@
'' character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.
formline() always returns
TRUE. See the perlform manpage for other examples.