> Can anybody think of any reason why I shouldn't just use " my $new_marc = > $bib_rec->as_usmarc();". And if you can, can you suggest an alternative way > to correctly turn the object into a string?
I'm not sure why you were using sprintf in the first place, so it's a bit difficult to give too much advice. When you call ->as_usmarc(), you get back essentially a "string", a sequence of characters. It's not an object. Also see MARC::File::USMARC encode at http://search.cpan.org/~gmcharlt/MARC-Record-2.0.3/lib/MARC/File/USMARC.pm#encode%28%29 since that's what this method is a wrapper around. As a general rule, I wouldn't use sprintf unless I was formatting the string, which you wouldn't be doing here. (In general, unlike some languages, sprintf is probably best used sparingly since using variable interpolation should take care of most needs. (ie $mesg = "Something bad happened: $errorcode \n";) About the only places I use sprintf in perl is formatting numbers. Jon Gorman
