How to read STDIN into a variable in perl

Question

I want to read from STDIN and have everything in a variable, how can I do this?

I'm know know almost nothing about Perl, and needed to create CGI script to read data from POST request, and was not able to find anything how to do that.

Presuming that you know how to assign to variables and read STDIN, I imagine you're having some other unspecified problem. Are you trying to read to EOF (list context)? Are you reading from a pipe that does not close? Are you reading from a Terminal? — tjd, Dec 22 '15 at 18:13
Related: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/953707/in-perl-how-can-i-read-an-entire-file-into-a-string — user202729, Oct 30 '18 at 16:34

score 8 · Accepted Answer · edited Dec 23 '15 at 03:29

8

This is probably not the most definitive way:

my $stdin = join("", <STDIN>);

Or you can enable slurp mode and get the whole file in one go:

local $/;
my $stdin = <STDIN>;

[but see man perlvar for caveats about making global changes to special variables]

If instead of a scalar you want an array with one element per line:

my @stdin = <STDIN>;

edited Dec 23 '15 at 03:29

ikegami

367,544
15
269
518

answered Dec 22 '15 at 17:49

Alnitak

334,560
70
407
495

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 25 '15 at 10:40

3

my $var = do { local $/; <> };

This doesn't quite read Stdin, it also allows files to specify on the command line for processing (like sed or grep).

This does include line feeds.

answered Dec 25 '15 at 10:40

Sobrique

52,974
7
60
101

How to read STDIN into a variable in perl

2 Answers2