How can I read the lines of a file into an array in Perl?

Question

I have a file named test.txt that is like this:

Test
Foo
Bar

But I want to put each line in a array and pri

Answer 1

The most basic example looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

open(F, "<", "test.txt") or die("Cannot open test.txt: $!\n"); # (1)
my @lines = ();
while(<F>) { chomp; push(@lines, $_); } # (2)
close(F);

print "@lines"; # (3) stringify

(1) is the place where the file is opened.

(2) File handles work nicely within list enviroments (scalar/list environments are defined by the left value), so if you assign an array to a file handle, all the lines are slurped into the array. The lines are delimited (ended) by the value of $/, the input record separator. If you use English;, you can use $IRS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR. This value defaults to the newline character \n;

While this seemed to be a nice idea, I've just forgot the fact that if you print all the lines, the ending \n will be printed too. Baaad me.

Originally the code was:

my @lines = <F>;

instead of the while loop. This is still a viable alternative, but you should swap (3) with chomping and then printing/stringifying all the elements:

for (@lines) { chomp; }
print "@lines";

(3) Stringifying means converting an array to a string and inserting the value $" between the array elements. This defaults to a space.

See: the perlvar page.

So the actual 2nd try is:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

open(F, "<", "test.txt") or die("Cannot open test.txt: $!\n"); # (1)
my @lines = <F>; # (2)
close(F);
chomp(@lines);

print "@lines"; # (3) stringify