Question

I was wondering how can I add a newline character (i.e. /n or <br>) after X number of characters.

For example, let’s say I have a perl variable $message =”aaaaabbbbbcccccdd”. I want to add a newline character after every 5 characters to this variable. So when I print the variable in html it will display:

aaaaa 
bbbbb 
ccccc 
dd    

What is the best way to do this? I was told to use substr or a count function, but I’m not sure how to go about it. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

An even shorter option.

$m = "aaaaabbbbbcccccdd";
$m =~ s/(.{1,5})/$1\n/gs;
print $m;

Outputs:

aaaaa
bbbbb
ccccc
dd

Of course I think my version is the best of all presented up to now. 😉