Neat and Tidy Formatting
The DBI features
a couple of
utility functions that can be used to tidy up strings into a form
suitable for easy reading. These two functions are
neat()
and
neat_list()
, the former operating on a single
scalar value, the latter operating on a list of scalar values.
For example, to use neat()
to tidy up some
strings, you could write:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w # # ch04/util/neat1: Tests out the DBI::neat() utility function. # use DBI; ### Declare some strings to neatify my $str1 = "Alligator's an extremely neat() and tidy person"; my $str2 = "Oh no\nhe's not!"; ### Neatify this first string to a maxlen of 40 print "String: " . DBI::neat( $str1, 40 ) . "\n"; ### Neatify the second string to a default maxlen of 400 print "String: " . DBI::neat( $str2 ) . "\n"; ### Neatify a number print "Number: " . DBI::neat( 42 * 9 ) . "\n"; ### Neatify an undef print "Undef: " . DBI::neat( undef ) . "\n"; exit;
which generates the output of:
String: 'Alligator's an extremely neat() and...' String: 'Oh no he's not!' Number: 378 Undef: undef
demonstrating that string values are quoted,[41]
whereas values known to be numeric are not. The first string has been
truncated to the desired length with ...
added.
Undefined values are recognized and returned as the string
undef
without quotes.
While the neat()
function is handy for single
values, the neat_list()
function is handy for
lists. It simply calls neat()
on each element of the referenced list before joining the list of values together ...
Get Programming the Perl DBI now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.