$^A (or $ACCUMULATOR in English). Eventually, when a
write is done, the contents of
$^A are written to some filehandle, but you could also read $^A
yourself and then set $^A back to ``''. Note that a format typically does one formline per line of form, but the formline function itself doesn't care how many newlines are embedded in the
PICTURE. This means that the
~ and ~~ tokens will treat the entire
PICTURE as a single line. You may therefore need to
use multiple formlines to implement a single record format, just like the
format compiler.
Be careful if you put double quotes around the picture, because an ``@'' character may be taken to mean the beginning of an array name. formline always returns
TRUE. See
the perlform manpage for other examples.