Perl 5.14 added an auto-dereferencing features to the hash and array operators, and I wrote about those in Use array references with the array operators. I’ve never particularly liked that feature, but I don’t have to like everything. Additionally, Perl 5.12 expanded the job of keys and values to also work on arrays. chromatic has [...]

Perl comes with extracts of the Unicode character data, but it hasn’t been easy to look up all of the information Perl knows about a character. Perl v5.15.7 adds a way to created an inverted map based on the property that you want to access. The Unicode::UCD module gives you access to some of the [...]

You might think that you know how to compare strings regardless of case, and you’re probably wrong. After you read this Item, you’ll be able to do it correctly and without doing any more work than you were doing before. Perl handles all the details for you. If you grew up in the ASCII world, [...]

What if you want to write a recursive subroutine but you don’t know the name of the current subroutine? Since Perl is a dynamic language and code references are first class objects, you might not know the name of the code reference, if it even has a name. Perl 5.16 introduces __SUB__ as a special [...]

[ 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 5.16 makes the Perl special variable, $$, writeable, but with some magic. That’s the variable that holds the process ID. Why would you ever want to do that? There’s not much to write about with this new feature, but there’s plenty to write against it since it introduces more magic (see commit 9cdac2 on [...]

The Perl 5 Porters are currently working on Perl 5.15, the development track that will end up as Perl 5.16. By reading the perldelta515* documentation, you can get a peek at what will mostly likely be in the next maintenance version of Perl. You need to read each of the perldelta5* in a development series [...]

Are you tired of adding the same modifiers to all of your regular expressions? For instance, if you might always add the /u modifier to turn on Unicode semantics on all of your patterns, including qr//, m//, and s///. Instead of remembering to do that to every pattern, the re that ships with Perl 5.14 [...]

Perl 5.10 introduced a flexible method resolution order mechanism. Instead of Perl’s default order (see Understand Perl’s default inheritance model), you can try something less stupid by using the mro pragma to specify which order perl. So far, there are only two resolution orders: dfs, which is Perl’s default depth-first search, and c3, a new [...]

Byte-order modifiers are one of the Perl 5.10 features farther along in perl5100delta, after the really big features. To any pack format, you can append a < or a > to specify that the format is little-endian or big-endian, respectively. This allows you to handle endianness in the formats that don’t have specify versions for [...]