What's the most defensive way to loop through lines in a file with Perl?

Question

I usually loop through lines in a file using the following code:

open my $fh, \'<\', $file or die \"Could not open file $file for reading: $!\\n\";
while          


        

Answer 1

While it is correct that the form of while (my $line=<$fh>) { ... } gets compiled to while (defined( my $line = <$fh> ) ) { ... } consider there are a variety of times when a legitimate read of the value "0" is misinterpreted if you do not have an explicit defined in the loop or testing the return of <>.

Here are several examples:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;

my $str = join "", map { "$_\n" } -10..10;
$str.="0";
my $sep='=' x 10;
my ($fh, $line);

open $fh, '<', \$str or 
     die "could not open in-memory file: $!";

print "$sep Should print:\n$str\n$sep\n";     

#Failure 1:
print 'while ($line=chomp_ln()) { print "$line\n"; }:',
      "\n";
while ($line=chomp_ln()) { print "$line\n"; } #fails on "0"
rewind();
print "$sep\n";

#Failure 2:
print 'while ($line=trim_ln()) { print "$line\n"; }',"\n";
while ($line=trim_ln()) { print "$line\n"; } #fails on "0"
print "$sep\n";
last_char();

#Failure 3:
# fails on last line of "0" 
print 'if(my $l=<$fh>) { print "$l\n" }', "\n";
if(my $l=<$fh>) { print "$l\n" } 
print "$sep\n";
last_char();

#Failure 4 and no Perl warning:
print 'print "$_\n" if <$fh>;',"\n";
print "$_\n" if <$fh>; #fails to print;
print "$sep\n";
last_char();

#Failure 5
# fails on last line of "0" with no Perl warning
print 'if($line=<$fh>) { print $line; }', "\n";
if($line=<$fh>) { 
    print $line; 
} else {
    print "READ ERROR: That was supposed to be the last line!\n";
}    
print "BUT, line read really was: \"$line\"", "\n\n";

sub chomp_ln {
# if I have "warnings", Perl says:
#    Value of  construct can be "0"; test with defined() 
    if($line=<$fh>) {
        chomp $line ;
        return $line;
    }
    return undef;
}

sub trim_ln {
# if I have "warnings", Perl says:
#    Value of  construct can be "0"; test with defined() 
    if (my $line=<$fh>) {
        $line =~ s/^\s+//;
        $line =~ s/\s+$//;
        return $line;
    }
    return undef;

}

sub rewind {
    seek ($fh, 0, 0) or 
        die "Cannot seek on in-memory file: $!";
}

sub last_char {
    seek($fh, -1, 2) or
       die "Cannot seek on in-memory file: $!";
}

I am not saying these are good forms of Perl! I am saying that they are possible; especially Failure 3,4 and 5. Note the failure with no Perl warning on number 4 and 5. The first two have their own issues...