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 15.5.18.8 How To Grok with Long Lines
 .....................................
 
 The necessity of long messages can often lead to a cumbersome or
 unreadable coding style.  Perl has several options that may prevent you
 from writing unreadable code, and `xgettext' does its best to do
 likewise.  This is where the dot operator (the string concatenation
 operator) may come in handy:
 
      print gettext ("This is a very long"
                     . " message that is still"
                     . " readable, because"
                     . " it is split into"
                     . " multiple lines.\n");
 
    Perl is smart enough to concatenate these constant string fragments
 into one long string at compile time, and so is `xgettext'.  You will
 only find one long message in the resulting POT file.
 
    Note that the future Perl 6 will probably use the underscore (`_')
 as the string concatenation operator, and the dot (`.') for
 dereferencing.  This new syntax is not yet supported by `xgettext'.
 
    If embedded newline characters are not an issue, or even desired, you
 may also insert newline characters inside quoted strings wherever you
 feel like it:
 
      print gettext ("<em>In HTML output
      embedded newlines are generally no
      problem, since adjacent whitespace
      is always rendered into a single
      space character.</em>");
 
    You may also consider to use here documents:
 
      print gettext <<EOF;
      <em>In HTML output
      embedded newlines are generally no
      problem, since adjacent whitespace
      is always rendered into a single
      space character.</em>
      EOF
 
    Please do not forget that the line breaks are real, i.e. they
 translate into newline characters that will consequently show up in the
 resulting POT file.
 
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