In Perl, how can I read an entire file into a string?
I'm trying to open an .html file as one big long string. This is what I've got:
open(FILE, 'index.html') or die "Can't read file 'filename' [$!]\n";
$document = <FILE>;
close (FILE);
print $document;
which results in:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN
However, I want the result to look like:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
This way I can search the entire document more easily.
Answer
I would do it like this:
my $file = "index.html";
my $document = do {
local $/ = undef;
open my $fh, "<", $file
or die "could not open $file: $!";
<$fh>;
};
Note the use of the three-argument version of open. It is much safer than the old two- (or one-) argument versions. Also note the use of a lexical filehandle. Lexical filehandles are nicer than the old bareword variants, for many reasons. We are taking advantage of one of them here: they close when they go out of scope.