[ This is the 100th Item we've shared with you in the two years this blog has been around. We deserve a holiday and we're taking it, so read us next year! Happy Holidays.] Perl 5.10 added rudimentary grammar support in its regular expressions. You could define many subpatterns directly in your pattern, use them [...]

Perl’s basic data type is the scalar, which takes its name from the mathematical term for “single item”. However, the scalar is really two things. You probably know that a scalar can be either a number or a string, or a number that looks the same as its string, or a string that can be [...]

If you project depends on a interaction with a web server, especially a remote one, you have some challenges with testing that portion. Even if you can get it working for you, when you distribute your code, someone else might not be able to reach your server for testing. Instead of relying on an external [...]

Perl’s split has some special cases and some perhaps surprising cases. The empty pattern, zero width match, the special argument ‘ ‘, and the /^/ act differently than you might expect from the general rule. The empty pattern, // The empty pattern is a special case that’s designed to give you a list of characters. [...]

To create grep- or map-like syntax, you need to use Perl’s prototypes, despite whatever we told you in Understand why you probably don’t need prototypes. Perl needs the special hints that prototypes to parse a block as an argument to a subroutine. First, remember the forms of grep. There’s a single expression version and a [...]

There are some regular expression tricks that can help you deal with balanced delimiters in a string. The split command takes a pattern, removes the parts of a string that match that pattern, and give you a list of the parts of the string between those separators. Said another way, split works when the parts [...]

You should understand how Perl’s prototypes work, not so you’ll use them but so you won’t be tempted to use them. Although prototypes can solve some problems, they don’t solve the problems most people want. Some languages, such as C, have function prototypes. You tell your function how many arguments it has and what sort [...]

The split built-in takes a string and turns it into a list, discarding the separators that you specify as a pattern. This is easy when the separator is simple, but seems hard if the separator gets more tricky. For a simple example, you can split an entry from /etc/password (although getpw* functions will do that [...]

When you’re using code references heavily, you’re going to have a problem figuring out which one of them is having a problem. You define them in possibly several and far-flung parts of your program, but when it comes to using them, you don’t know which one you are using. You can’t really print its value [...]

Perl has had Unicode support since Perl 5.6, which means that most Perl tutorials have been bending the truth a bit when they tell you that a Perl identifier, the name that you give to variables, starts with [A-Za-z_] and continues with [0-9A-Za-z_]. With Unicode support, you have many more characters available to you, but [...]