use English;
-at the top of your program. This will alias all the short names to the
-long names in the current package. Some even have medium names,
-generally borrowed from B<awk>.
+at the top of your program. This aliases all the short names to the long
+names in the current package. Some even have medium names, generally
+borrowed from B<awk>. In general, it's best to use the
-If you don't mind the performance hit, variables that depend on the
-currently selected filehandle may instead be set by calling an
-appropriate object method on the IO::Handle object. (Summary lines
-below for this contain the word HANDLE.) First you must say
+ use English '-no_match_vars';
+
+invocation if you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or $POSTMATCH, as it avoids
+a certain performance hit with the use of regular expressions. See
+L<English>.
+
+Variables that depend on the currently selected filehandle may be set by
+calling an appropriate object method on the IO::Handle object, although
+this is less efficient than using the regular built-in variables. (Summary
+lines below for this contain the word HANDLE.) First you must say
use IO::Handle;
HANDLE->method(EXPR)
Each method returns the old value of the IO::Handle attribute.
-The methods each take an optional EXPR, which if supplied specifies the
+The methods each take an optional EXPR, which, if supplied, specifies the
new value for the IO::Handle attribute in question. If not supplied,
most methods do nothing to the current value--except for
autoflush(), which will assume a 1 for you, just to be different.
+
Because loading in the IO::Handle class is an expensive operation, you should
learn how to use the regular built-in variables.
you try to assign to this variable, either directly or indirectly through
a reference, you'll raise a run-time exception.
+You should be very careful when modifying the default values of most
+special variables described in this document. In most cases you want
+to localize these variables before changing them, since if you don't,
+the change may affect other modules which rely on the default values
+of the special variables that you have changed. This is one of the
+correct ways to read the whole file at once:
+
+ open my $fh, "foo" or die $!;
+ local $/; # enable localized slurp mode
+ my $content = <$fh>;
+ close $fh;
+
+But the following code is quite bad:
+
+ open my $fh, "foo" or die $!;
+ undef $/; # enable slurp mode
+ my $content = <$fh>;
+ close $fh;
+
+since some other module, may want to read data from some file in the
+default "line mode", so if the code we have just presented has been
+executed, the global value of C<$/> is now changed for any other code
+running inside the same Perl interpreter.
+
+Usually when a variable is localized you want to make sure that this
+change affects the shortest scope possible. So unless you are already
+inside some short C<{}> block, you should create one yourself. For
+example:
+
+ my $content = '';
+ open my $fh, "foo" or die $!;
+ {
+ local $/;
+ $content = <$fh>;
+ }
+ close $fh;
+
+Here is an example of how your own code can go broken:
+
+ for (1..5){
+ nasty_break();
+ print "$_ ";
+ }
+ sub nasty_break {
+ $_ = 5;
+ # do something with $_
+ }
+
+You probably expect this code to print:
+
+ 1 2 3 4 5
+
+but instead you get:
+
+ 5 5 5 5 5
+
+Why? Because nasty_break() modifies C<$_> without localizing it
+first. The fix is to add local():
+
+ local $_ = 5;
+
+It's easy to notice the problem in such a short example, but in more
+complicated code you are looking for trouble if you don't localize
+changes to the special variables.
+
The following list is ordered by scalar variables first, then the
arrays, then the hashes.
and dynamically scoped to the current BLOCK.
The use of this variable anywhere in a program imposes a considerable
-performance penalty on all regular expression matches. See L<BUGS>.
+performance penalty on all regular expression matches. See L</BUGS>.
=item $PREMATCH
string.) This variable is read-only.
The use of this variable anywhere in a program imposes a considerable
-performance penalty on all regular expression matches. See L<BUGS>.
+performance penalty on all regular expression matches. See L</BUGS>.
=item $POSTMATCH
enclosed by the current BLOCK). (Mnemonic: C<'> often follows a quoted
string.) Example:
- $_ = 'abcdefghi';
+ local $_ = 'abcdefghi';
/def/;
print "$`:$&:$'\n"; # prints abc:def:ghi
This variable is read-only and dynamically scoped to the current BLOCK.
The use of this variable anywhere in a program imposes a considerable
-performance penalty on all regular expression matches. See L<BUGS>.
+performance penalty on all regular expression matches. See L</BUGS>.
=item $LAST_PAREN_MATCH
pattern. (Mnemonic: the (possibly) Nested parenthesis that most
recently closed.)
-This is primarly used inside C<(?{...})> blocks for examining text
+This is primarily used inside C<(?{...})> blocks for examining text
recently matched. For example, to effectively capture text to a variable
(in addition to C<$1>, C<$2>, etc.), replace C<(...)> with
C<$.> is reset when the filehandle is closed, but B<not> when an open
filehandle is reopened without an intervening close(). For more
-details, see L<perlop/"I/O Operators">. Because C<< <> >> never does
+details, see L<perlop/"IE<sol>O Operators">. Because C<< <> >> never does
an explicit close, line numbers increase across ARGV files (but see
examples in L<perlfunc/eof>).
paragraph, even if it's a newline. (Mnemonic: / delimits
line boundaries when quoting poetry.)
- undef $/; # enable "slurp" mode
- $_ = <FH>; # whole file now here
+ local $/; # enable "slurp" mode
+ local $_ = <FH>; # whole file now here
s/\n[ \t]+/ /g;
Remember: the value of C<$/> is a string, not a regex. B<awk> has to be
instead of lines, with the maximum record size being the referenced
integer. So this:
- $/ = \32768; # or \"32768", or \$var_containing_32768
- open(FILE, $myfile);
- $_ = <FILE>;
+ local $/ = \32768; # or \"32768", or \$var_containing_32768
+ open my $fh, $myfile or die $!;
+ local $_ = <$fh>;
will read a record of no more than 32768 bytes from FILE. If you're
not reading from a record-oriented file (or your OS doesn't have
Also see L<Error Indicators>.
+=item ${^ENCODING}
+
+The encoding used to interpret native eight-bit encodings to Unicode,
+see L<encode>. An opaque C<Encode::XS> object.
+
=item $OS_ERROR
=item $ERRNO
See also the documentation of C<use VERSION> and C<require VERSION>
for a convenient way to fail if the running Perl interpreter is too old.
-The use of this variable is deprecated. The floating point representation
-can sometimes lead to inaccurate numeric comparisons. See C<$^V> for a
-more modern representation of the Perl version that allows accurate string
-comparisons.
+The floating point representation can sometimes lead to inaccurate
+numeric comparisons. See C<$^V> for a more modern representation of
+the Perl version that allows accurate string comparisons.
=item $COMPILING
is identical to C<$Config{'osname'}>. See also L<Config> and the
B<-V> command-line switch documented in L<perlrun>.
+=item ${^OPEN}
+
+An internal variable used by PerlIO. A string in two parts, separated
+by a C<\0> byte, the first part is the input disciplines, the second
+part is the output disciplines.
+
=item $PERLDB
=item $^P
epoch (beginning of 1970). The values returned by the B<-M>, B<-A>,
and B<-C> filetests are based on this value.
+=item ${^TAINT}
+
+Reflects if taint mode is on or off (i.e. if the program was run with
+B<-T> or not). True for on, false for off.
+
=item $PERL_VERSION
=item $^V
warn "No \"our\" declarations!\n" if $^V and $^V lt v5.6.0;
+To convert C<$^V> into its string representation use sprintf()'s
+C<"%vd"> conversion:
+
+ printf "version is v%vd\n", $^V; # Perl's version
+
See the documentation of C<use VERSION> and C<require VERSION>
for a convenient way to fail if the running Perl interpreter is too old.
The name that the Perl binary itself was executed as, from C's C<argv[0]>.
This may not be a full pathname, nor even necessarily in your path.
+=item ARGV
+
+The special filehandle that iterates over command-line filenames in
+C<@ARGV>. Usually written as the null filehandle in the angle operator
+C<< <> >>. Note that currently C<ARGV> only has its magical effect
+within the C<< <> >> operator; elsewhere it is just a plain filehandle
+corresponding to the last file opened by C<< <> >>. In particular,
+passing C<\*ARGV> as a parameter to a function that expects a filehandle
+may not cause your function to automatically read the contents of all the
+files in C<@ARGV>.
+
=item $ARGV
contains the name of the current file when reading from <>.
initially consists of the arguments to any B<-I> command-line
switches, followed by the default Perl library, probably
F</usr/local/lib/perl>, followed by ".", to represent the current
-directory. If you need to modify this at runtime, you should use
+directory. ("." will not be appended if taint checks are enabled, either by
+C<-T> or by C<-t>.) If you need to modify this at runtime, you should use
the C<use lib> pragma to get the machine-dependent library properly
loaded also:
operator uses this hash to determine whether a particular file has
already been included.
+If the file was loaded via a hook (e.g. a subroutine reference, see
+L<perlfunc/require> for a description of these hooks), this hook is
+by default inserted into %INC in place of a filename. Note, however,
+that the hook may have set the %INC entry by itself to provide some more
+specific info.
+
=item %ENV
=item $ENV{expr}
following Perl expression, which uses a single-quoted string:
eval q{
- open PIPE, "/cdrom/install |";
- @res = <PIPE>;
- close PIPE or die "bad pipe: $?, $!";
+ open my $pipe, "/cdrom/install |" or die $!;
+ my @res = <$pipe>;
+ close $pipe or die "bad pipe: $?, $!";
};
After execution of this statement all 4 variables may have been set.
in the scope of C<use English>. For that reason, saying C<use
English> in libraries is strongly discouraged. See the
Devel::SawAmpersand module documentation from CPAN
-(http://www.perl.com/CPAN/modules/by-module/Devel/)
+(http://www.cpan.org/modules/by-module/Devel/)
for more information.
Having to even think about the C<$^S> variable in your exception
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