Edit on 11/26 - Please note - I am not looking for the "right" way to open/read a file, or the way I should open/read a file every single time. I was just interested to find out what way most people use, and maybe learn a few new methods at the same time :)
A very common block of code in my perl programs is opening a file and reading or writing to it. I have seen so many ways of doing this, and my style on performing this task has changed over the years a few times. I'm just wondering what the best (if there is a best way) method is to do this?
I used to open a file like this:
my $input_file = "/path/to/my/file";
open INPUT_FILE, "<$input_file" || die "Can't open $input_file: $!\n";
but I think that has problems with error trapping.
Adding parenthesis seems to fix the error trapping:
open (INPUT_FILE, "<$input_file") || die "Can't open $input_file: $!\n";
I know you can also assign a filehandle to a variable, so instead of using "INPUT_FILE" like I did above, I could have used $input_filehandle - is that way better?
For reading a file, if it is small, is there anything wrong with globbing, like this?
my @array = <INPUT_FILE>;
or
my $file_contents = join( "\n", <INPUT_FILE> );
or should you always loop through, like this:
my @array;
while (<INPUT_FILE>) {
push(@array, $_);
}
I know there are so many ways to accomplish things in perl, I'm just wondering if there are preferred/standard methods of opening and reading in a file?