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 [...]

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 [...]