Re: perl decoder

On Mon, 20 Jul 1998 address@hidden wrote:

> robb,
> 
> this is really more of a perl question than a general decoder question.
> i currently have a couple of decoders working here on  my machine that
> i think were written by you.  your name appears in some of the commented
> out directory names.  anyway, i needed to write a decoder of my own to
> handle some local data and i adopted a little of your perl knowledge
> into my program.  i am a perl novice by the way, but making progress.
> 
> my problem is that my data used to be in seperate files
> so it was no problem reading in the whole file as 1 string. now, my 
> format has changed and the data is in one file. i know how to
> extract the substrings etc, but what i can't figure out is how to
> 'not' read the whole file as one string.  i only need two or three
> lines at a time as a string.  each station is seperated by a blank line.
> 
> since i have corresponded with you via e-mail some time ago about these
> decoders, i was wondering if you could shed some light on how to maybe
> accomplish this.  i can use "1998" as the beginning of line anchor and
> a blank line (the length of which is 2) as the end of line anchor. i just
> cant figure out the syntax of this operation. if you are too busy
> i totally understand. thanks...
> 
> dave bennett
> 
Dave,

This line says it all: 

# Now begin parsing file and decoding observations breaking on cntrl C
$/ = "\cC" ;


This says to reads input until a control C is encountered, the default is
to read individual lines.  ie "\n" .  One can set it any control
character, I never tried any other type of chars.

Robb...



===============================================================================
Robb Kambic                                Unidata Program Center
Software Engineer III                      Univ. Corp for Atmospheric Research
address@hidden             WWW: http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/
===============================================================================