By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 28, 2016
Here’s a sample Perl program that demonstrates how you can include (embed) data inside of your Perl program, right in there next to the source code.
This simple program takes the data after the special Perl __END__
tag, and makes it available to your Perl source code.
#!/usr/bin/perl while (<main::DATA>) { print $_; } __END__ George Washington Abraham Lincoln John F. Kennedy
As you can see, you loop through the data with this line of code:
while (<main::DATA>)
Of course in a real program you’d probably do something a little harder inside of your data loop, so here’s something a little harder:
#!/usr/bin/perl while (<main::DATA>) { ($firstname, $lastname) = split; print "$lastname, $firstname\n"; } __END__ George Washington Abraham Lincoln John Kennedy
Okay, admittedly that wasn’t great, but it’s all I have right now. :)