formlinePICTURE
,LIST
This is an internal function used by formats, although you may also call it. It formats a list of values according to the contents of
PICTURE
, placing the output into the format output accumulator,
$^A
. Eventually, when a
write
is done, the contents of
$^A
are written to some filehandle, but you could also read
$^A
yourself and then set
$^A
back to
""
. Note that a format typically does one
formline
per line of form, but the
formline
function itself doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the
PICTURE
. This means that the
~
and
~~
tokens will treat the entire
PICTURE
as a single line. You may therefore need to use multiple formlines to implement a single record-format, just like the format compiler.
Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, since an
@
character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.
formline
always returns true. See "Formats" in
Chapter 2
for other examples.