Making Copies - Perl

This marks the finale of our coverage of text in Perl (until we get into some more of the advanced Perl features at any rate). We left off with the here document and how to use it to display text exactly as we type it in, using a Mark Twain poem that he had written for his daughter's tombstone (which interestingly enough was a rewrite of another poet's poem). We also learned a little bit about ASCII and the values as they pertain to text, showcasing the 93 visible characters.

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By: James Payne

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March 10, 2008

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TOOLS YOU CAN USE

If we want to repeat a string a bunch of times, we can do so by multiplying it. Let's say I walk into a wrestling arena and am fighting the Badass Bulgarian. Here is a program that demonstrates what the crowd might say, if they know what is good for them:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$chant="USA! ";

$chantTwo="Bulgaria blows! ";

$chantThree="James Payne! ";

print $chant x 10;

print "\n" . $chantTwo x 10;

print "\n" . $chantThree x 10;

This results in:

USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows! Bulgaria blows!

James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne! James Payne!

But what if we wanted to not have the words listed on the same line?

#!/usr/bin/perl

$chant="\tUSA! \n";

$chantTwo="\tBulgaria blows! ";

$chantThree="James Payne! ";

print $chant x 10;

This prints the variable $chant 10 times, skipping a line and adding a tab at the beginning of each new line, resulting in the following:

USA!

Next: Chomping It Up Pac-Man Style >>