NAME

File::LoadLines - Load lines from file

SYNOPSIS

    use File::LoadLines;

    my @lines = loadlines("mydata.txt");
    ...

DESCRIPTION

File::LoadLines provides an easy way to load the contents of a text file into an array of lines. It is intended for relatively small files like config files that are often produced by weird tools (and users).

It automatically handles ASCII, Latin-1 and UTF-8 text. When the file has a BOM, it handles UTF-8, UTF-16 LE and BE, and UTF-32 LE and BE.

Recognized line terminators are NL (Unix, Linux), CRLF (DOS, Windows) and CR (Mac)

EXPORT

loadlines

FUNCTIONS

loadlines

    my @lines = loadlines("mydata.txt");
    my @lines = loadlines("mydata.txt", $options);

Basically, the file is opened, read, decoded and split into lines that are returned in the result array. Line terminators are removed.

In scalar context, returns an array reference.

The first argument may be the name of a file, an opened file handle, or a reference to a string that contains the data.

The second argument can be used to influence the behaviour. It is a hash reference of option settings.

Note that loadlines() is a slurper, it reads the whole file into memory and requires temporarily memory for twice the size of the file.

split: Enabled by default.
If set to zero, the data is not split into lines but returned as a single string.
chomp: Enabled by default.
If set to zero, the line terminators are not removed from the resultant lines.
encoding: If specified, loadlines() will use this encoding to decode the file data if it cannot automatically detect the encoding.
If you pass an options hash, File::LoadLines will set "encoding" to the encoding it detected and used for this file data.

HINTS

When you have raw file data (e.g. from a zip), you can use loadlines() to decode and unpack:

    open( my $data, '<', \$contents );
    $lines = loadlines( $data, $options );

AUTHOR

Johan Vromans, "<JV at cpan.org>"

SUPPORT AND DOCUMENTATION

Development of this module takes place on GitHub: https://github.com/sciurius/perl-File-LoadLines.

You can find documentation for this module with the perldoc command.

    perldoc File::LoadLines

Please report any bugs or feature requests using the issue tracker on GitHub.

COPYRIGHT & LICENSE

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.