How can Perl's print add a newline by default?

Question

In Perl most of my print statements take the form

print "hello." . "\n";

Is there a nice way to avoid keeping all the pesky "\n"s lying around?

I know I could make a new function such as myprint that automatically appends \n, but it would be nice if I could override the existing print.

Answer 1

In Perl 6 there is, the say function

Answer 2

Perl 6 has the say function that automatically appends \n.

You can also use say in Perl 5.10 or 5.12 if you add

use feature qw(say);

to the beginning of your program. Or you can use Modern::Perl to get this and other features.

See perldoc feature for more details.

Answer 3

If Perl 5.10+ is not an option, here is a quick and dirty approximation. It's not exactly the same, since say has some magic when its first arg is a handle, but for printing to STDOUT:

sub say {print @_, "\n"}

say 'hello';

Answer 4

The way you're writing your print statement is unnecessarily verbose. There's no need to separate the newline into its own string. This is sufficient.

print "hello.\n";

This realization will probably make your coding easier in general.

In addition to using use feature "say" or use 5.10.0 or use Modern::Perl to get the built in say feature, I'm going to pimp perl5i which turns on a lot of sensible missing Perl 5 features by default.

Answer 5

Perhaps you want to change your output record separator to linefeed with:

$\ = "\n";

$ perl -e 'print q{hello};print q{goodbye}' | od -c
0000000    h   e   l   l   o   g   o   o   d   b   y   e                
0000014
$ perl -e '$\ = qq{\n}; print q{hello};print q{goodbye}' | od -c
0000000    h   e   l   l   o  \n   g   o   o   d   b   y   e  \n        
0000016

Update: my answer speaks to capability rather than advisability. I don't regard adding "\n" at the end of lines to be a "pesky" chore, but if someone really wants to avoid them, this is one way. If I had to maintain a bit of code that uses this technique, I'd probably refactor it out pronto.