Perl Best Practices

4.9. Here Documents

Use a heredoc when a multiline string exceeds two lines.

The "break-after-newlines-and-concatenate" approach is fine for a small number of lines, but it starts to become inefficientand uglyfor larger chunks of text.

For multiline strings that exceed two lines, use a heredoc:

$usage = <<"END_USAGE"; Usage: $0 <file> [-full] [-o] [-beans] Options: -full : produce a full dump -o : dump in octal -beans : source is Java END_USAGE

instead of:

$usage = "Usage: $0 <file> [-full] [-o] [-beans]\n" . "Options:\n" . " -full : produce a full dump\n" . " -o : dump in octal\n" . " -beans : source is Java\n" ;