Perl

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Computing: Programming: Perl

Perl is a programming language widely used for web sites and Linux servers. It can be somewhat baffling to the eye – largely due to the frequent use of regular expressions – but due to its popularity it has been greatly refined and there is a large base of existing code available for reuse.

Articles

Usage

• Perl reference
• Perl built-in functions
• Perl regex

Design

• Perl vs. PHP

Other Documentation

• CPAN: documentation links at the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

Libraries and Modules

• CPAN: search the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network

Notes

• Although single-quoted strings are widely cited as not interpreting anything, you do have to backslash certain characters if you want them represented literally:
  • the single-quote itself ( \' )
  • period ( \. )
• One of the reasons for PHP's popularity over Perl for developing web applications is that it prints errors to the web browser, rather than simply quitting abruptly (causing either an incomplete page or, more likely, a 5xx Server Error). Perl does not do this by default. It is, however, quite easy to make this happen, by including the following line of code near the beginning of a program:

use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);