#!/usr/bin/perl -w
##
## Programmer:    Craig Stuart Sapp <craig@ccrma.stanford.edu>
## Creation Date: Fri Jul 23 04:43:31 PDT 1999
## Last Modified: Fri Jul 23 04:43:36 PDT 1999
## Filename:      /home/httpd/html/perl/examples
## Syntax:        Perl 5
##
## Description:   A demonstration of how to get the first word
##                in each line.  And a demonstration of how to
##                pass parameters to a PERL subroutine.
##

$file = "This is a test\n";
$file .= "1 is a test\n";
$file .= "2 is a test\n";
$file .= "3 is a test\n";
$file .= "4 is a test\n";
$file .= "5 is a test\n";

print "Original data:\n";
print $file;

print "\n\nFirst words from data:\n";
print join(" ", firstwords($file)), "\n";

sub firstwords {
   my ($data) = @_;
   return $data =~ /\s*(\S+)[^\n]*/g;
}