- formline PICTURE,LIST
This is an internal function used by
formats, though you may call it, too. It formats (see perlform) a list of values according to the contents of PICTURE, placing the output into the format output accumulator,$^A(or$ACCUMULATORin English). Eventually, when awriteis done, the contents of$^Aare written to some filehandle. You could also read$^Aand then set$^Aback to"". Note that a format typically does oneformlineper line of form, but theformlinefunction 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, because an
@character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name.formlinealways returns true. See perlform for other examples.

