Re: [Q2] (Re: The strings design document)

[Jeff Clites]

On Apr 28, 2004, at 5:01 AM, Dan Sugalski wrote:
At 3:17 AM -0700 4/28/04, Jeff Clites wrote:
On Apr 23, 2004, at 2:43 PM, Dan Sugalski wrote:
For example, consider the following:
  use Unicode;
  open FOO, "foo.txt", :charset(latin-3);
  open BAR, "bar.txt", :charset(big5);
  $filehandle = 0;
  while (<>) {
    if ($filehandle++) {
      print FOO $_;
    } else {
      print BAR $_;
    }
    $filehadle %= 2;
  }
What's the input record separator here?
The filehandle default, which depends on the encoding and character 
set of the input data, or so Larry's told me.
So the nature of my question here is that I assume the input record 
separator will be set as a string, with something similar to: $/ = "\n" 
or $/ = "----" or whatever.

If that's the case, presumably the user won't have to keep resetting it 
as they open files stored in a different encodings, if (from their 
point of view) they're using the same separator--they'll just set it 
once. But having it defined as a string would seem to imply that you'll 
have to transcode as you read to a common representation, in order to 
find the line endings. That is, if $/ was assigned "latin-1" when it 
was created, then you'll be forced to transcode to UTF-8 (or something) 
as you read, right?

JEff