print chop; VS chop; print;

[yusufm]

Why does this work (prints out expected strings):

cat somefile | perl -ne 'chop; print;'

while this just prints out blank lines:

cat somefile | perl -ne 'print chop;'

thanks.

 

[plalli]

Why does this work (prints out expected strings):

cat somefile | perl -ne 'chop; print;'

while this just prints out blank lines:

cat somefile | perl -ne 'print chop;'

Because that's what it's supposed to do.

Have you read the Perl built-in documentation for the function you're
using?

perldoc -f chop

chop does not return the chop'ed string - it returns the character that
was chopped. In your case, that's the newline character.

Paul Lalli.

 

[Tad McClellan]

Why does this work (prints out expected strings):

cat somefile | perl -ne 'chop; print;'

Because print() with no arguments prints $_

while this just prints out blank lines:

cat somefile | perl -ne 'print chop;'

print() prints the return value from chop().

What is the return value from chop()?

perldoc -f chop




But you probably should be using chomp() instead, or maybe
even the -l command line switch...