$/ = "\035";
my $num_input_records = 0;
while (<IN>) {
+ s/^\s+//;
+ s/\s+$//;
+ next unless $_; # skip if record has only whitespace, as might occur
+ # if file includes newlines between each MARC record
$marc_records .= $_; # FIXME - this sort of string concatenation
# is probably rather inefficient
$num_input_records++;