How can I wrap lines to 45 characters in a Perl program? - perl

Question

I have this text I am writing in a Perl CGI program:
$text = $message;
#lines = split(/\n/, $text);
$lCnt .= $#lines+1;
$lineStart = 80;
$lineHeight = 24;
I want to force a return after 45 characters. How do I do that here?
Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

Look at the core Text::Wrap module:
use Text::Wrap;
my $longstring = "this is a long string that I want to wrap it goes on forever and ever and ever and ever and ever";
$Text::Wrap::columns = 45;
print wrap('', '', $longstring) . "\n";

Answer 2

Check out Text::Wrap. It will do exactly what you need.

Answer 3

Since Text::Wrap for some reason doesn't work for the OP, here is a solution using a regex:
my $longstring = "lots of text to wrap, and some more text, and more "
. "still. thats right, even more. lots of text to wrap, "
. "and some more text.";
my $wrap_at = 45;
(my $wrapped = $longstring) =~ s/(.{0,$wrap_at}(?:\s|$))/$1\n/g;
print $wrapped;
which prints:
lots of text to wrap, and some more text, and
more still. thats right, even more. lots of
text to wrap, and some more text.

Answer 4

The Unicode::LineBreak module can do more sophisticated wrapping of non-English text (Especially East Asian scripts) than Text::Wrap, and has some nice features like optionally being able to recognize URIs and avoid splitting them.
Example:
#!/usr/bin/env perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Unicode::LineBreak;
my $longstring = "lots of text to wrap, and some more text, and more "
. "still. thats right, even more. lots of text to wrap, "
. "and some more text.";
my $wrapper = Unicode::LineBreak->new(ColMax => 45, Format => "NEWLINE");
print for $wrapper->break($longstring);