PERLOP(1)

💖 PERLOP(1) — the `perlop` page, bestie edition 💖

Perl Programmers Reference Guide ✨ section 1, babes ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

perlop</purl> — Perl expressions: operators, precedence, string literals 🎀

Okay so this is the page. Operators. Precedence. String literals. The whole vibe. Let's go. 🦋

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

So here's the thing that makes Perl Perl, bestie: in Perl, the operator decides what happens, and it does not care what type your operands are. Like, "$x + $y" is always numeric addition, periodt. And if $x or $y aren't holding numbers? Perl just tries to convert them into numbers first. No drama, no questions asked. 💅

This is different from a lot of other dynamic languages, where the operation is decided by the type of the first argument. And it also means Perl has two versions of some operators — one for numbers, one for strings. Example: "$x == $y" compares two numbers for equality, and "$x eq $y" compares two strings. Two whole different operators, two whole different vibes. 😭

But — and this is the little plot twist — there are a few exceptions:

The operator "x" can be either string repetition or list repetition, depending on the type of the left operand 👀
And "&", "|", "^" and "~" can be either string or numeric bit operations 🎀

🧮 Operator Precedence and Associativity 🧮

Operator precedence and associativity in Perl work more or less like they do in mathematics. No cap. 📐

Operator precedence means some operators group more tightly than others. Take "2 + 4 * 5" — multiplication has higher precedence, so "4 * 5" gets grouped together as the right-hand operand of the addition, instead of "2 + 4" being grouped as the left-hand operand of the multiplication. It's as if it were written "2 + (4 * 5)", not "(2 + 4) * 5". So you get "2 + 20 == 22", not "6 * 5 == 30". Slay. ✨

Operator associativity is the rule for what happens when you stack the same operator over and over: usually they group left or they group right. Example: in "9 - 3 - 2", subtraction is left associative, so "9 - 3" is grouped as the left-hand operand of the second subtraction, instead of "3 - 2" being grouped as the right-hand operand of the first one. It's like writing "(9 - 3) - 2", not "9 - (3 - 2)". So you get "6 - 2 == 4", not "9 - 1 == 8". 💅

Now, for simple operators that evaluate all their operands and then combine the values somehow, precedence and associativity (and parentheses) imply some ordering requirements on those combining operations. For example, in 2 + 4 * 5, the grouping implied by precedence means the multiplication of 4 and 5 has to happen before the addition of 2 and 20 — simply because the result of that multiplication is needed as one of the operands of the addition. 🫶

But the order of operations is not fully determined by that. In "2 * 2 + 4 * 5" both multiplications must be performed before the addition, but the grouping says nothing about the order in which those two multiplications happen. And here's the general rule: Perl evaluates the operands of an operator in left-to-right order. 💫

A few operators, like "&&=", have special evaluation rules that can mean an operand doesn't get evaluated at all. In general, the top-level operator in an expression is the one in control of operand evaluation. 👑

🔗 Chaining, babes 🔗

Some comparison operators, as their associativity, chain with some operators of the same precedence (but never with operators of different precedence). Chaining means each comparison is performed on the two arguments surrounding it — so every interior argument takes part in two comparisons — and the comparison results get implicitly ANDed. 🔥

So "$x < $y <= $z" behaves exactly like "$x < $y && $y <= $z", assuming "$y" is as simple a scalar as it looks. And that ANDing short-circuits just like "&&" does — the sequence of comparisons stops the moment one of them yields false. 🛑

In a chained comparison, each argument expression is evaluated at most once, even if it takes part in two comparisons — but the result of the evaluation gets fetched for each comparison. (And it isn't evaluated at all if the short-circuiting means it isn't needed for any comparisons.) This matters when computing an interior argument is expensive or non-deterministic. For example:

if ($x < expensive_sub() <= $z) { ...

is not entirely like:

if ($x < expensive_sub() && expensive_sub() <= $z) { ...

but instead closer to:

my $tmp = expensive_sub();
if ($x < $tmp && $tmp <= $z) { ...

…in that the subroutine is only called once. 🎀

But it's not exactly like that latter code either, because the chained comparison doesn't actually involve any temporary variable (named or otherwise) — there's no assignment. This doesn't make much difference when the expression is a call to an ordinary subroutine, but it matters more with an lvalue subroutine, or if the argument expression yields some unusual kind of scalar by other means. For example, if the argument expression yields a tied scalar, then the expression is evaluated to produce that scalar at most once, but the value of that scalar may be fetched up to twice — once for each comparison in which it's actually used. 😳

In this example, the expression is evaluated only once, and the tied scalar (the result of the expression) is fetched for each comparison that uses it:

if ($x < $tied_scalar < $z) { ...

In the next example, the expression is evaluated only once, and the tied scalar is fetched once as part of the operation within the expression. The result of that operation is then fetched for each comparison — which normally doesn't matter unless that expression result is also magical due to operator overloading:

if ($x < $tied_scalar + 42 < $z) { ...

Some operators are instead non-associative, meaning it is a syntax error to use a sequence of those operators of the same precedence. For example, "$x .. $y .. $z" is an error. 💀

📋 The Precedence Table (highest → lowest) 📋

Perl operators have the following associativity and precedence, listed from highest precedence to lowest. Operators borrowed from C keep the same precedence relationship with each other, even where C's precedence is slightly screwy. (This makes learning Perl easier for C folks. 🫶) With very few exceptions, these all operate on scalar values only, not array values.

left        terms and list operators (leftward)
left        ->
nonassoc    ++ --
right       **
right       ! ~ ~. \ and unary + and -
left        =~ !~
left        * / % x
left        + - .
left        << >>
nonassoc    named unary operators
nonassoc    isa
chained     < > <= >= lt gt le ge
chain/na    == != eq ne <=> cmp ~~
left        & &.
left        | |. ^ ^.
left        &&
left        || ^^ //
nonassoc    ..  ...
right       ?:
right       = += -= *= etc. goto last next redo dump
left        , =>
nonassoc    list operators (rightward)
right       not
left        and
left        or xor

The following sections cover these operators in detail. Each section covers all the operators for a single precedence level, and the sections are ordered highest precedence first — same order as the table above. 👑

Many operators can be overloaded for objects. See overload. 🧚

🎀 Terms and List Operators (Leftward) 🎀

A TERM has the highest precedence in Perl. What counts as a TERM? Variables, quote and quote-like operators, any expression in parentheses, and any function whose arguments are parenthesized. 💖

Actually — hot take — there aren't really functions in this sense. There are just list operators and unary operators behaving like functions, because you put parentheses around the arguments. These are all documented in perlfunc. 📚

If any list operator (print(), etc.) or any unary operator (chdir(), etc.) is followed by a left parenthesis as the next token, then the operator and the arguments inside the parentheses are taken to be of highest precedence, just like a normal function call. ✨

But without parentheses? The precedence of list operators like "print", "sort", or "chmod" is either very high or very low, depending on whether you're looking at the left side or the right side of the operator. 😭 It's giving dual personality. For example:

@ary = (1, 3, sort 4, 2);
print @ary;         # prints 1324

The commas on the right of the "sort" are evaluated before the "sort", but the commas on the left are evaluated after. In other words, list operators tend to gobble up all the arguments that follow, and then act like a simple TERM with regard to the preceding expression. So be careful with parentheses, bestie:

# These evaluate exit before doing the print:
print($foo, exit);  # Obviously not what you want.
print $foo, exit;   # Nor is this.

# These do the print before evaluating exit:
(print $foo), exit; # This is what you want.
print($foo), exit;  # Or this.
print ($foo), exit; # Or even this.

Also note that:

print ($foo & 255) + 1, "\n";

probably doesn't do what you expect at first glance. 👀 The parentheses enclose the argument list for "print", which gets evaluated (printing the result of "$foo & 255"). Then one is added to the return value of "print" (usually 1). The result is something like this:

1 + 1, "\n";    # Obviously not what you meant.

To do what you actually meant, you must write:

print(($foo & 255) + 1, "\n");

See "Named Unary Operators" for more discussion of this. 💅

Also parsed as terms are the "do {}" and "eval {}" constructs, as well as subroutine and method calls, and the anonymous constructors "[]" and "{}". 🦋

See also "Quote and Quote-like Operators" below, as well as "I/O Operators". 🌸

➡️ The Arrow Operator ➡️

"->" is an infix dereference operator, just as it is in C and C++. 🎯

If the right side is one of a "[...]", "{...}", or a "(...)" subscript, then the left side must be either a hard or symbolic reference to an array, a hash, or a subroutine respectively. (Or, technically speaking, a location capable of holding a hard reference, if it's an array or hash reference being used for assignment.) See perlreftut and perlref. 💖

Otherwise, the right side is a method name or a simple scalar variable containing either the method name or a subroutine reference — and (if it is a method name) the left side must be either an object (a blessed reference) or a class name (that is, a package name). See perlobj. 👑

The right side may also be the name of a subroutine, prefixed with the "&" sigil. This creates what looks like a lexical method invocation, where the method subroutine is resolved lexically instead of by name by a search within the packages of the object's class. 🧚 This resolution happens entirely at compile-time, and performs the same as a regular subroutine call at runtime. Iconic behaviour, honestly. ✨

okay so one last thing about dereferencing before we move on — the dereferencing cases (as opposed to method-calling cases) are somewhat extended by the "postderef" feature. For all the deets on that, go read "Postfix Dereference Syntax" in perlref. 🦋

💅 Auto-increment and Auto-decrement 💅

"++" and "--" do exactly what they do in C, bestie. Put them before a variable and they bump it up or down by one before handing you the value back. Put them after and they bump it after returning the value. Classic.

$i = 0;  $j = 0;
print $i++;  # prints 0
print ++$j;  # prints 1

ngl this next bit is a jump-scare: just like in C, Perl does not define when the variable gets incremented or decremented. All you know is it happens sometime before or after the value comes back. Which also means modifying a variable twice in the same statement leads to undefined behavior. Please don't do this: $i = $i ++; print ++ $i + $i ++; Perl will not guarantee what those give you. Periodt.

okay but the auto-increment operator has a little extra builtin magic ✨. If you increment a variable that's numeric, or that has ever been used in a numeric context, you get a normal increment, nothing weird. BUT if the variable has only been used in string contexts since it was set, and its value isn't the empty string, and it matches the pattern /^[a-zA-Z]*[0-9]*\z/, then the increment happens as a string — every character preserved within its range, with carry. So:

print ++($foo = "99");      # prints "100"
print ++($foo = "a0");      # prints "a1"
print ++($foo = "Az");      # prints "Ba"
print ++($foo = "zz");      # prints "aaa"

"undef" is always treated as numeric, and specifically it gets changed to 0 before incrementing — so a post-increment of an undef value returns 0 and not "undef". 🙈

The auto-decrement operator is not magical. sorry bestie. 💀

⭐ Exponentiation ⭐

Binary "**" is the exponentiation operator. It binds even more tightly than unary minus, so "-2**4" is "-(2**4)", not "(-2)**4". (Under the hood this is implemented using C's pow(3) function, which lowkey actually works on doubles internally.)

Heads up: certain exponentiation expressions are ill-defined — these include "0**0", "1**Inf", and "Inf**0". Do not expect any particular results from these special cases, because the results are platform-dependent. 🫶

🎀 Symbolic Unary Operators 🎀

Unary "!" performs logical negation, that is, "not". See also "not" if you want a lower precedence version of this.

Unary "-" performs arithmetic negation if the operand is numeric, including any string that looks like a number. If the operand is an identifier, you get back a string consisting of a minus sign concatenated with the identifier. Otherwise, if the string starts with a plus or minus, you get back a string starting with the opposite sign. One effect of these rules is that "-bareword" is equivalent to the string "-bareword". If, however, the string begins with a non-alphabetic character (excluding "+" or "-"), Perl will attempt to convert the string to a numeric, and the arithmetic negation is performed. And if the string can't be cleanly converted to a numeric, Perl gives you the warning Argument "the string" isn't numeric in negation (-) at ....

Unary "~" performs bitwise negation, that is, 1's complement. For example, "0666 & ~027" is 0640. (See also "Integer Arithmetic" and "Bitwise String Operators".) Note that the width of the result is platform-dependent: "~0" is 32 bits wide on a 32-bit platform, but 64 bits wide on a 64-bit platform — so if you're expecting a certain bit width, remember to use the "&" operator to mask off the excess bits. 💅

Starting in Perl 5.28, it is a fatal error to try to complement a string containing a character with an ordinal value above 255. Not a vibe. Don't.

If the "bitwise" feature is enabled via "use feature 'bitwise'" or "use v5.28", then unary "~" always treats its argument as a number, and an alternate form of the operator, "~.", always treats its argument as a string. So "~0" and "~"0"" will both give 2**32-1 on 32-bit platforms, whereas "~.0" and "~."0"" will both yield "\xff". Until Perl 5.28, this feature produced a warning in the "experimental::bitwise" category. 👑

Unary "+" has no effect whatsoever, even on strings. Its whole personality is syntactic: it separates a function name from a parenthesized expression that would otherwise be interpreted as the complete list of function arguments. (See the examples above under "Terms and List Operators (Leftward)".)

Unary "\" creates references. If its operand is a single sigilled thing, it creates a reference to that object. If its operand is a parenthesised list, then it creates references to the things mentioned in the list. Otherwise it puts its operand in list context, and creates a list of references to the scalars in the list provided by the operand. See perlreftut and perlref. Do not confuse this behavior with the behavior of backslash within a string — although honestly both forms do convey the notion of protecting the next thing from interpolation. 🦋

🌸 Binding Operators 🌸

Binary "=~" binds a scalar expression to a pattern match. Certain operations search or modify the string $_ by default, and this operator is what makes that kind of operation work on some other string. The right argument is a search pattern, substitution, or transliteration. The left argument is what's supposed to be searched, substituted, or transliterated instead of the default $_. When used in scalar context, the return value generally indicates the success of the operation. The exceptions are substitution ("s///") and transliteration ("y///") with the "/r" (non-destructive) option, which cause the return value to be the result of the substitution. Behavior in list context depends on the particular operator. See "Regexp Quote-Like Operators" for the details and perlretut for examples using these operators.

If the right argument is an expression rather than a search pattern, substitution, or transliteration, it is interpreted as a search pattern at run time. Note that this means its contents will be interpolated twice, so:

'\\' =~ q'\\';

is not ok, because the regex engine will end up trying to compile the pattern "\", which it will consider a syntax error. 😭

Binary "!~" is just like "=~" except the return value is negated in the logical sense.

Binary "!~" with a non-destructive substitution ("s///r") or transliteration ("y///r") is a syntax error. Just so you know. 🚫

🔥 Multiplicative Operators 🔥

Binary "*" multiplies two numbers.

Binary "/" divides two numbers.

Binary "%" is the modulo operator — it computes the division remainder of its first argument with respect to its second argument. Given integer operands $m and $n: if $n is positive, then "$m % $n" is $m minus the largest multiple of $n less than or equal to $m. If $n is negative, then "$m % $n" is $m minus the smallest multiple of $n that is not less than $m (that is, the result will be less than or equal to zero). If the operands $m and $n are floating point values and the absolute value of $n (that is abs($n)) is less than "(UV_MAX + 1)", only the integer portion of $m and $n will be used in the operation (Note: here "UV_MAX" means the maximum of the unsigned integer type). If the absolute value of the right operand (abs($n)) is greater than or equal to "(UV_MAX + 1)", "%" computes the floating-point remainder $r in the equation "($r = $m - $i*$n)" where $i is a certain integer that makes $r have the same sign as the right operand $n (not as the left operand $m like C function fmod()) and the absolute value less than that of $n. Also note: when "use integer" is in scope, "%" gives you direct access to the modulo operator as implemented by your C compiler. That one is not as well defined for negative operands, but it will execute faster. 🏃♀️

Binary "x" is the repetition operator. In scalar context, or if the left operand is neither enclosed in parentheses nor a "qw//" list, it performs a string repetition. In that case it supplies scalar context to the left operand, and returns a string consisting of the left operand string repeated the number of times specified by the right operand. If the "x" is in list context, and the left operand is either enclosed in parentheses or a "qw//" list, it performs a list repetition. In that case it supplies list context to the left operand, and returns a list consisting of the left operand list repeated the number of times specified by the right operand. If the right operand is zero or negative (raising a warning on negative), it returns an empty string or an empty list, depending on the context.

print '-' x 80;             # print row of dashes

print "\t" x ($tab/8), ' ' x ($tab%8);      # tab over

@ones = (1) x 80;           # a list of 80 1's
@ones = (5) x @ones;        # set all elements to 5

💜 Additive Operators 💜

Binary "+" returns the sum of two numbers.

Binary "-" returns the difference of two numbers.

Binary "." concatenates two strings.

🌈 Shift Operators 🌈

Binary "<<" returns the value of its left argument shifted left by the number of bits specified by the right argument. Arguments should be integers. (See also "Integer Arithmetic".)

Binary ">>" returns the value of its left argument shifted right by the number of bits specified by the right argument. Arguments should be integers. (See also "Integer Arithmetic".)

If "use integer" (see "Integer Arithmetic") is in force then signed C integers are used (arithmetic shift), otherwise unsigned C integers are used (logical shift), even for negative shiftees. In arithmetic right shift the sign bit is replicated on the left, in logical shift zero bits come in from the left.

Either way, the implementation isn't going to generate results larger than the size of the integer type Perl was built with (32 bits or 64 bits).

Shifting by a negative number of bits means the reverse shift: left shift becomes right shift, right shift becomes left shift. This is unlike in C, where negative shift is undefined. 🙅♀️

Shifting by a value greater than or equal to integer size (in bits) results in zero (all bits fall off), except that under "use integer" right shifting a negative value by such an amount results in -1. This is unlike in C, where shifting by too many bits is undefined.

If you get tired of being subject to your platform's native integers, the "use bigint" pragma neatly sidesteps the issue altogether:

print 20 << 20;  # 20971520
print 20 << 32;  # 0 with 32-bit integer,
                 # 85899345920 with 64-bit integer
use bigint;
print 20 << 100; # 25353012004564588029934064107520

🧚 Named Unary Operators 🧚

The various named unary operators are treated as functions with one argument, with optional parentheses.

okay so real talk, bestie — the parenthesis glow-up rule ✨ If any list operator (print(), etc.) or any unary operator (chdir(), etc.) gets a left parenthesis as its very next token, then the operator and the args inside those parens get bumped all the way up to highest precedence, exactly like a normal function call. it's giving "nothing to see here, just a regular function" 💅

so like, because named unary operators outrank ||:

chdir $foo    || die;       # (chdir $foo) || die
chdir($foo)   || die;       # (chdir $foo) || die
chdir ($foo)  || die;       # (chdir $foo) || die
chdir +($foo) || die;       # (chdir $foo) || die

but because * outranks named operators, the whole thing flips:

chdir $foo * 20;    # chdir ($foo * 20)
chdir($foo) * 20;   # (chdir $foo) * 20
chdir ($foo) * 20;  # (chdir $foo) * 20
chdir +($foo) * 20; # chdir ($foo * 20)

rand 10 * 20;       # rand (10 * 20)
rand(10) * 20;      # (rand 10) * 20
rand (10) * 20;     # (rand 10) * 20
rand +(10) * 20;    # rand (10 * 20)

and about precedence specifically: the filetest operators, like -f, -M, etc., get treated like named unary operators, but they do not follow this functional parenthesis rule. so for example, -f($file).".bak" is literally equivalent to -f "$file.bak". no cap, that's just the deal 😭

also go peek at "Terms and List Operators (Leftward)" if you want more of this energy.

👑 Class Instance Operator 👑

Binary isa evaluates to true when the left argument is an object instance of the class given by the right argument — or of a subclass derived from that class 🫶. If the left argument is not defined, is not a blessed object instance, and doesn't derive from the class on the right, the operator evaluates as false. The right argument can hand you the class either as a bareword or as a scalar expression that yields a string class name:

if ( $obj isa Some::Class ) { ... }

if ( $obj isa "Different::Class" ) { ... }
if ( $obj isa $name_of_class ) { ... }

This feature is available from Perl 5.31.6 onwards when it's enabled by use feature 'isa'. And it gets switched on automatically by a use v5.36 (or higher) declaration in the current scope. iconic behavior tbh 💖

🌸 Relational Operators 🌸

Perl operators that return true or false generally hand back values you can safely use as numbers. like, the relational operators in this section and the equality operators in the next one return 1 for true, and a special version of the defined empty string, "", which counts as a zero but is exempt from warnings about improper numeric conversions — same energy as "0 but true". she's special and she knows it ✨

Binary < returns true if the left argument is numerically less than the right argument.

Binary > returns true if the left argument is numerically greater than the right argument.

Binary <= returns true if the left argument is numerically less than or equal to the right argument.

Binary >= returns true if the left argument is numerically greater than or equal to the right argument.

Binary lt returns true if the left argument is stringwise less than the right argument.

Binary gt returns true if the left argument is stringwise greater than the right argument.

Binary le returns true if the left argument is stringwise less than or equal to the right argument.

Binary ge returns true if the left argument is stringwise greater than or equal to the right argument.

A sequence of relational operators, like $x < $y <= $z, does chained comparisons, in the manner described above in the section "Operator Precedence and Associativity". ⚠️ but beware — they do not chain with equality operators, because those have lower precedence.

lt, le, ge, gt, and cmp (that last one gets its own moment in the next section) use the collation (sort) order specified by the current LC_COLLATE locale if a use locale form that includes collation is in effect. see perllocale. Depending on what your platform can do, these can give reasonable results with Unicode, but the standard Unicode::Collate and Unicode::Collate::Locale modules offer much more powerful solutions to collation issues. iykyk 🦋

For case-insensitive comparisons, go look at the fc in perlfunc case-folding function, available in Perl v5.16 or later:

if ( fc($x) eq fc($y) ) { ... }

🎀 Equality Operators 🎀

Binary == returns true if the left argument is numerically equal to the right argument.

Binary != returns true if the left argument is numerically not equal to the right argument.

Binary eq returns true if the left argument is stringwise equal to the right argument.

Binary ne returns true if the left argument is stringwise not equal to the right argument.

A sequence of the above equality operators, like $x == $y == $z, does chained comparisons, in the manner described above in the section "Operator Precedence and Associativity". ⚠️ but beware — they do not chain with relational operators, because those have higher precedence.

Binary <=> returns -1, 0, or 1 depending on whether the left argument is numerically less than, equal to, or greater than the right argument. If your platform supports NaN's (not-a-numbers) as numeric values, using them with <=> returns undef. NaN is not <, ==, >, <= or >= anything (even NaN), so those 5 return false. NaN != NaN returns true, and so does NaN != anything else. If your platform doesn't support NaN's, then NaN is just a string with numeric value 0.

$ perl -le '$x = "NaN"; print "No NaN support here" if $x == $x'
$ perl -le '$x = "NaN"; print "NaN support here" if $x != $x'

(Note that the bigint, bigrat, and bignum pragmas all support NaN.) 🫶

Binary cmp returns -1, 0, or 1 depending on whether the left argument is stringwise less than, equal to, or greater than the right argument.

here's where you can literally see the difference between <=> and cmp:

print 10 <=> 2 #prints 1
print 10 cmp 2 #prints -1

(same deal between the relational operators described in the previous section: gt and >, lt and <, etc.)

Binary ~~ does a smartmatch between its arguments. Smart matching is complicated enough to warrant two subsections, starting just below 👇

The two-sided ordering operators <=> and cmp, and the smartmatch operator ~~, are non-associative with respect to each other and with respect to the equality operators of the same precedence.

🧚 Smartmatch Operator 🧚

the smartmatch feature is discouraged for new code and retained for backward compatibility. 💀

The smartmatch operator was introduced in 5.10.0 and had significant changes in 5.10.1. It's enabled by default and in all feature bundles up to 5.40. To use smartmatch with a later feature bundle you'll need to enable it explicitly:

use v5.42;
use feature "smartmatch";

Binary ~~ does a "smartmatch" between its arguments. This is mostly used implicitly in the when construct described in perlsyn, although not all when clauses call the smartmatch operator. Unique among all of Perl's operators, the smartmatch operator can recurse. 😭

It's also unique in that every other Perl operator imposes a context (usually string or numeric context) on its operands, autoconverting those operands to those imposed contexts. Smartmatch does the opposite vibe — it infers contexts from the actual types of its operands and uses that type info to pick a suitable comparison mechanism. main character energy tbh ✨

The ~~ operator compares its operands "polymorphically", figuring out how to compare them according to their actual types (numeric, string, array, hash, etc.). Like the equality operators it shares a precedence with, ~~ returns 1 for true and "" for false. It's often best read aloud as "in", "inside of", or "is contained in", because the left operand is often being looked for inside the right operand. That makes the order of the operands to the smartmatch operand often the opposite of the regular match operator. In other words, the "smaller" thing usually goes in the left operand and the bigger one goes in the right.

What a smartmatch actually does depends on what type of things its arguments are, as determined by the table below. The first row of the table whose types apply determines the smartmatch behavior. And because what actually happens is mostly determined by the type of the second operand, the table is sorted on the right operand instead of on the left. slay 💅

okay so every chunk of this table has the same three columns — Left, Right, and Description and pseudocode — here we go:

Any / undef — check whether Any is undefined
- like: !defined Any
Any / Object — invoke ~~ overloading on Object, or die

Right operand is an ARRAY:

ARRAY1 / ARRAY2 — recurse on paired elements of ARRAY1 and ARRAY2[2]
- like: (ARRAY1[0] ~~ ARRAY2[0]) && (ARRAY1[1] ~~ ARRAY2[1]) && ...
HASH / ARRAY — any ARRAY elements exist as HASH keys
- like: grep { exists HASH->{$_} } ARRAY
Regexp / ARRAY — any ARRAY elements pattern match Regexp
- like: grep { /Regexp/ } ARRAY
undef / ARRAY — undef in ARRAY
- like: grep { !defined } ARRAY
Any / ARRAY — smartmatch each ARRAY element[3]
- like: grep { Any ~~ $_ } ARRAY

Right operand is a HASH:

HASH1 / HASH2 — all same keys in both HASHes
- like: keys HASH1 == grep { exists HASH2->{$_} } keys HASH1
ARRAY / HASH — any ARRAY elements exist as HASH keys
- like: grep { exists HASH->{$_} } ARRAY
Regexp / HASH — any HASH keys pattern match Regexp
- like: grep { /Regexp/ } keys HASH
undef / HASH — always false (undef cannot be a key)
- like: 0 == 1
Any / HASH — HASH key existence
- like: exists HASH->{Any}

Right operand is CODE:

ARRAY / CODE — sub returns true on all ARRAY elements[1]
- like: !grep { !CODE->($_) } ARRAY
HASH / CODE — sub returns true on all HASH keys[1]
- like: !grep { !CODE->($_) } keys HASH
Any / CODE — sub passed Any returns true
- like: CODE->(Any)

💜 Right operand is a Regexp:

…and that is exactly where this part runs out of road, bestie 🍓 the regexp tea spills over into the next chunk, so hold that thought 💅

ARRAY on the left, Regexp on the right — any ARRAY elements match Regexp like: grep { /Regexp/ } ARRAY
HASH on the left, Regexp on the right — any HASH keys match Regexp like: grep { /Regexp/ } keys HASH
Any on the left, Regexp on the right — pattern match like: Any =~ /Regexp/

Other combos, bestie:

Object vs Any — invoke ~~ overloading on Object, or fall back to...
Any vs Num — numeric equality like: Any == Num
Num vs nummy[4] — numeric equality like: Num == nummy
undef vs Any — check whether undefined like: !defined(Any)
Any vs Any — string equality like: Any eq Any

🌸 Notes 🌸

Empty hashes or arrays match.
That is, each element smartmatches the element of the same index in the other array.[3]
If a circular reference is found, fall back to referential equality.
Either an actual number, or a string that looks like one.

okay so the smartmatch implicitly dereferences any non-blessed hash or array reference, which is why the HASH and ARRAY rows apply in those cases. For blessed references, the Object rows are the ones doing the work. And heads up: smartmatches involving hashes only ever look at hash keys, never hash values. that's the rule, no cap.

the like code entry is not always an exact rendition, jsyk. for example, the smartmatch operator short-circuits whenever possible, but grep does not. also, grep in scalar context returns the number of matches, but ~~ returns only true or false. 💅

Unlike most operators, the smartmatch operator knows to treat undef specially:

use v5.10.1;
@array = (1, 2, 3, undef, 4, 5);
say "some elements undefined" if undef ~~ @array;

Each operand is considered in a modified scalar context, the modification being that array and hash variables are passed by reference to the operator, which implicitly dereferences them. Both elements of each pair are the same:

use v5.10.1;

my %hash = (red    => 1, blue   => 2, green  => 3,
            orange => 4, yellow => 5, purple => 6,
            black  => 7, grey   => 8, white  => 9);

my @array = qw(red blue green);

say "some array elements in hash keys" if  @array ~~  %hash;
say "some array elements in hash keys" if \@array ~~ \%hash;

say "red in array" if "red" ~~  @array;
say "red in array" if "red" ~~ \@array;

say "some keys end in e" if /e$/ ~~  %hash;
say "some keys end in e" if /e$/ ~~ \%hash;

Two arrays smartmatch if each element in the first array smartmatches (that is, is "in") the corresponding element in the second array, recursively. it's giving nesting, and honestly? obsessed.

use v5.10.1;
my @little = qw(red blue green);
my @bigger = ("red", "blue", [ "orange", "green" ] );
if (@little ~~ @bigger) {  # true!
    say "little is contained in bigger";
}

Because the smartmatch operator recurses on nested arrays, this will still report that "red" is in the array:

use v5.10.1;
my @array = qw(red blue green);
my $nested_array = [[[[[[[ @array ]]]]]]];
say "red in array" if "red" ~~ $nested_array;

If two arrays smartmatch each other, then they are deep copies of each others' values, as this example reports:

use v5.12.0;
my @a = (0, 1, 2, [3, [4, 5], 6], 7);
my @b = (0, 1, 2, [3, [4, 5], 6], 7);

if (@a ~~ @b && @b ~~ @a) {
    say "a and b are deep copies of each other";
}
elsif (@a ~~ @b) {
    say "a smartmatches in b";
}
elsif (@b ~~ @a) {
    say "b smartmatches in a";
}
else {
    say "a and b don't smartmatch each other at all";
}

If you were to set $b[3] = 4, then instead of reporting that "a and b are deep copies of each other", it now reports that "b smartmatches in a". That's because the corresponding position in @a contains an array that (eventually) has a 4 in it. 🔥

Smartmatching one hash against another reports whether both contain the same keys, no more and no less. This could be used to see whether two records have the same field names, without caring what values those fields might have. For example:

use v5.10.1;
sub make_dogtag {
    state $REQUIRED_FIELDS = { name=>1, rank=>1, serial_num=>1 };

    my ($class, $init_fields) = @_;

    die "Must supply (only) name, rank, and serial number"
        unless $init_fields ~~ $REQUIRED_FIELDS;

    ...
}

However, this only does what you mean if $init_fields is indeed a hash reference. The condition $init_fields ~~ $REQUIRED_FIELDS also allows the strings "name", "rank", "serial_num" as well as any array reference that contains "name" or "rank" or "serial_num" anywhere to pass through. so like... vibe check your inputs, okay? 🙈

The smartmatch operator is most often used as the implicit operator of a when clause. See the section on "Switch Statements" in perlsyn. iykyk.

🦋 Smartmatching of Objects 🦋

To avoid relying on an object's underlying representation, if the smartmatch's right operand is an object that doesn't overload ~~, it raises the exception "Smartmatching a non-overloaded object breaks encapsulation". That's because one has no business digging around to see whether something is "in" an object. These are all illegal on objects without a ~~ overload:

%hash ~~ $object
   42 ~~ $object
"fred" ~~ $object

However, you can change the way an object is smartmatched by overloading the ~~ operator. This is allowed to extend the usual smartmatch semantics. For objects that do have an ~~ overload, see overload.

Using an object as the left operand is allowed, although not very useful. Smartmatch rules take precedence over overloading, so even if the object in the left operand has smartmatch overloading, this will be ignored. A left operand that is a non-overloaded object falls back on a string or numeric comparison of whatever the ref operator returns. That means that

$object ~~ X

does not invoke the overload method with X as an argument. Instead the above table is consulted as normal, and based on the type of X, overloading may or may not be invoked. For simple strings or numbers, "in" becomes equivalent to this:

$object ~~ $number          ref($object) == $number
$object ~~ $string          ref($object) eq $string

For example, this reports that the handle smells IOish (but please don't really do this!):

use IO::Handle;
my $fh = IO::Handle->new();
if ($fh ~~ /\bIO\b/) {
    say "handle smells IOish";
}

That's because it treats $fh as a string like "IO::Handle=GLOB(0x8039e0)", then pattern matches against that. 💀 iconic behavior honestly.

⭐ Bitwise And ⭐

Binary & returns its operands ANDed together bit by bit. Although no warning is currently raised, the result is not well defined when this operation is performed on operands that aren't either numbers (see "Integer Arithmetic") nor bitstrings (see "Bitwise String Operators").

Note that & has lower priority than relational operators, so for example the parentheses are essential in a test like

print "Even\n" if ($x & 1) == 0;

If the "bitwise" feature is enabled via use feature 'bitwise' or use v5.28, then this operator always treats its operands as numbers. Before Perl 5.28 this feature produced a warning in the "experimental::bitwise" category.

🌈 Bitwise Or and Exclusive Or 🌈

Binary | returns its operands ORed together bit by bit. If both corresponding bits are 0, the resulting bit is 0; if either is 1, the result is 1.

Binary ^ returns its operands XORed together bit by bit. If both corresponding bits are 0 or both are 1, the resulting bit is 0; if just one is 1, the result is 1.

Although no warning is currently raised, the results are not well defined when these operations are performed on operands that aren't either numbers (see "Integer Arithmetic") nor bitstrings (see "Bitwise String Operators").

Note that | and ^ have lower priority than relational operators, so for example the parentheses are essential in a test like

print "false\n" if (8 | 2) != 10;

If the "bitwise" feature is enabled via use feature 'bitwise' or use v5.28, then this operator always treats its operands as numbers. Before Perl 5.28. this feature produced a warning in the "experimental::bitwise" category.

🎀 C-style Logical And 🎀

Binary && performs a short-circuit logical AND operation. That is, if the left operand is false, the right operand is not even evaluated. Scalar or list context propagates down to the right operand if it is evaluated.

&& returns the last value evaluated (unlike C's &&, which returns 0 or 1). so yeah, she's built different.

As an alternative to && when used for control flow, Perl provides the and operator (see below). The short-circuit behavior is identical. The precedence of and is much lower, however, so that you can safely use it after a list operator without the need for parentheses.

💜 C-style Logical Or, Xor, and Defined Or 💜

Binary || performs a short-circuit logical OR operation. That is, if the left operand is true, the right operand is not even evaluated. Scalar or list context propagates down to the right operand if it does get evaluated.

As an alternative to || when used for control flow, Perl provides the or operator (see below). The short-circuit behavior is identical. The precedence of or is much lower, however, so that you can safely use it after a list operator without the need for parentheses:

unlink "alpha", "beta", "gamma"
        or gripe(), next LINE;

With the C-style operator that would have been written like this:

unlink("alpha", "beta", "gamma")
        || (gripe(), next LINE);

It would be even more readable to write that this way:

unless(unlink("alpha", "beta", "gamma")) {
    gripe();
    next LINE;
}

Using or for assignment is unlikely to do what you want; see below. like. genuinely. don't do it. 😭

Binary ^^ performs a logical XOR operation. Both operands are evaluated and the result is true only if exactly one of the operands is true. Scalar or list context propagates down to the right operand.

Although it has no direct equivalent in C, bestie, Perl's // operator is related to its C-style or. fr fr it's exactly the same as ||, except that it tests the left hand side's definedness instead of its truth. So EXPR1 // EXPR2 returns the value of EXPR1 if it's defined; otherwise, the value of EXPR2 is returned. (EXPR1 is evaluated in scalar context, EXPR2 in the context of // itself). Usually, this is the same result as defined(EXPR1) ? EXPR1 : EXPR2 — except that the ternary-operator form can be used as an lvalue, while EXPR1 // EXPR2 cannot. This is very useful for providing default values for variables. If you actually want to test if at least one of $x and $y is defined, use defined($x // $y).

The ||, ^^ and // operators return the last value evaluated (unlike C's || which returns 0 or 1). Thus, a reasonably portable way to find out the home directory might be:

$home =  $ENV{HOME}
      // $ENV{LOGDIR}
      // (getpwuid($<))[7]
      // die "You're homeless!\n";

In particular, this means that you shouldn't use this for selecting between two aggregates for assignment:

@a = @b || @c;            # This doesn't do the right thing
@a = scalar(@b) || @c;    # because it really means this.
@a = @b ? @b : @c;        # This works fine, though.

🌈 Range Operators 🌈

Binary .. is the range operator, and bestie it's really two different operators depending on the context. In list context, it returns a list of values counting (up by ones) from the left value to the right value. If the left value is greater than the right value then it returns the empty list. The range operator is useful for writing foreach (1..10) loops and for doing slice operations on arrays. No temporary array is created when the range operator is used as the expression in foreach loops.

The range operator also works on strings, using the magical auto-increment, see below.

In scalar context, .. returns a boolean value. The operator is bistable, like a flip-flop, and emulates the line-range (comma) operator of sed, awk, and various editors. Each .. operator maintains its own boolean state, even across calls to a subroutine that contains it. It is false as long as its left operand is false. Once the left operand is true, the range operator stays true until the right operand is true, AFTER which the range operator becomes false again. It doesn't become false till the next time the range operator is evaluated. It can test the right operand and become false on the same evaluation it became true (as in awk), but it still returns true once. If you don't want it to test the right operand until the next evaluation, as in sed, just use three dots (...) instead of two. In all other regards, ... behaves just like .. does.

The right operand is not evaluated while the operator is in the false state, and the left operand is not evaluated while the operator is in the true state. The precedence is a little lower than || and &&. The value returned is either the empty string for false, or a sequence number (beginning with 1) for true. The sequence number is reset for each range encountered. The final sequence number in a range has the string E0 appended to it, which doesn't affect its numeric value, but gives you something to search for if you want to exclude the endpoint. You can exclude the beginning point by waiting for the sequence number to be greater than 1.

If either operand of scalar .. is a constant expression, that operand is considered true if it is equal (==) to the current input line number (the $. variable).

To be pedantic, the comparison is actually int(EXPR) == int(EXPR), but that is only an issue if you use a floating point expression; when implicitly using $. as described in the previous paragraph, the comparison is int(EXPR) == int($.) which is only an issue when $. is set to a floating point value and you are not reading from a file. Furthermore, "span" .. "spat" or 2.18 .. 3.14 will not do what you want in scalar context because each of the operands are evaluated using their integer representation.

Examples:

As a scalar operator:

if (101 .. 200) { print; } # print 2nd hundred lines, short for
                           #  if ($. == 101 .. $. == 200) { print; }

next LINE if 1 .. /^$/;    # skip header lines, short for
                           #   next LINE if $. == 1 .. /^$/;
                           # (typically in a loop labeled LINE)

s/^/> / if /^$/ .. eof();  # quote body

# parse mail messages
while (<>) {
    $in_header =   1  .. /^$/;
    $in_body   = /^$/ .. eof;
    if ($in_header) {
        # do something
    } else { # in body
        # do something else
    }
} continue {
    close ARGV if eof;             # reset $. each file
}

Here's a simple example to illustrate the difference between the two range operators:

@lines = ("   - Foo",
          "01 - Bar",
          "1  - Baz",
          "   - Quux");

foreach (@lines) {
    if (/0/ .. /1/) {
        print "$_\n";
    }
}

This program will print only the line containing "Bar". If the range operator is changed to ..., it will also print the "Baz" line.

And now some examples as a list operator:

for (101 .. 200) { print }      # print $_ 100 times
@foo = @foo[0 .. $#foo];        # an expensive no-op
@foo = @foo[$#foo-4 .. $#foo];  # slice last 5 items

Because each operand is evaluated in integer form, 2.18 .. 3.14 will return two elements in list context.

@list = (2.18 .. 3.14); # same as @list = (2 .. 3);

The range operator in list context can make use of the magical auto-increment algorithm if both operands are strings, subject to the following rules:

With one exception (below), if both strings look like numbers to Perl, the magic increment will not be applied, and the strings will be treated as numbers (more specifically, integers) instead.

For example, "-2".."2" is the same as -2..2, and "2.18".."3.14" produces "2, 3".

The exception to the above rule is when the left-hand string begins with 0 and is longer than one character, in this case the magic increment will be applied, even though strings like "01" would normally look like a number to Perl.

For example, "01".."04" produces "01", "02", "03", "04", and "00".."-1" produces "00" through "99" - this may seem surprising, but see the following rules for why it works this way. To get dates with leading zeros, you can say:

@z2 = ("01" .. "31");
print $z2[$mday];

If you want to force strings to be interpreted as numbers, you could say

@numbers = ( 0+$first .. 0+$last );

Note: In Perl versions 5.30 and below, any string on the left-hand side beginning with "0", including the string "0" itself, would cause the magic string increment behavior. This means that on these Perl versions, "0".."-1" would produce "0" through "99", which was inconsistent with 0..-1, which produces the empty list. This also means that "0".."9" now produces a list of integers instead of a list of strings.

If the initial value specified isn't part of a magical increment sequence (that is, a non-empty string matching "/^[a-zA-Z]*[0-9]*\z/"), only the initial value will be returned.

For example, "ax".."az" produces "ax", "ay", "az", but "*x".."az" produces only "*x".

For other initial values that are strings that do follow the rules of the magical increment, the corresponding sequence will be returned.

For example, you can say

@alphabet = ("A" .. "Z");

to get all normal letters of the English alphabet, or

$hexdigit = (0 .. 9, "a" .. "f")[$num & 15];

to get a hexadecimal digit.

If the final value specified is not in the sequence that the magical increment would produce, the sequence goes until the next value would be longer than the final value specified. If the length of the final string is shorter than the first, the empty list is returned.

For example, "a".."--" is the same as "a".."zz", "0".."xx" produces "0" through "99", and "aaa".."--" returns the empty list.

As of Perl 5.26, the list-context range operator on strings works as expected in the scope of "use feature 'unicode_strings". In previous versions, and outside the scope of that feature, it exhibits "The "Unicode Bug"" in perlunicode: its behavior depends on the internal encoding of the range endpoint.

Because the magical increment only works on non-empty strings matching "/^[a-zA-Z]*[0-9]*\z/", the following will only return an alpha:

use charnames "greek";
my @greek_small =  ("\N{alpha}" .. "\N{omega}");

To get the 25 traditional lowercase Greek letters, including both sigmas, you could use this instead:

use charnames "greek";
my @greek_small =  map { chr } ( ord("\N{alpha}")
                                    ..
                                 ord("\N{omega}")
                               );

However, because there are many other lowercase Greek characters than just those, to match lowercase Greek characters in a regular expression, you could use the pattern /(?:(?=\p{Greek})\p{Lower})+/ (or the experimental feature /(?[ \p{Greek} & \p{Lower} ])+/).

💖 Conditional Operator 💖

Ternary ?: is the conditional operator, just as in C. It works much like an if-then-else. If the argument before the ? is true, the argument before the : is returned, otherwise the argument after the : is returned. For example:

printf "I have %d dog%s.\n", $n,
        ($n == 1) ? "" : "s";

Scalar or list context propagates downward into the 2nd or 3rd argument, whichever is selected.

$x = $ok ? $y : $z;  # get a scalar
@x = $ok ? @y : @z;  # get an array
$x = $ok ? @y : @z;  # oops, that's just a count!

The operator may be assigned to if both the 2nd and 3rd arguments are legal lvalues (meaning that you can assign to them):

($x_or_y ? $x : $y) = $z;

Because this operator produces an assignable result, using assignments without parentheses will get you in trouble. For example, this:

$x % 2 ? $x += 10 : $x += 2

Really means this:

(($x % 2) ? ($x += 10) : $x) += 2

Rather than this:

($x % 2) ? ($x += 10) : ($x += 2)

That should probably be written more simply as:

$x += ($x % 2) ? 10 : 2;

👑 Assignment Operators 👑

= is the ordinary assignment operator. 💅

Assignment operators work as in C. That is,

$x += 2;

is equivalent to

$x = $x + 2;

…except it doesn't duplicate any side effects that dereferencing the lvalue might trigger, like from tie(). The other assignment operators work the same way, bestie. Here's the whole roster:

**=    +=    *=    &=    &.=    <<=    &&=
       -=    /=    |=    |.=    >>=    ||=
       .=    %=    ^=    ^.=           //=
             x=                        ^^=

So even though they're all cute and grouped by family up there, every single one of them has the precedence of assignment. And listen — these combined assignment operators can only operate on scalars. The ordinary assignment operator is the flexible one that can assign to arrays, hashes, lists, and even references. (See "Context" and "List value constructors" in perldata, and "Assigning to References" in perlref.)

Unlike in C, the scalar assignment operator produces a valid lvalue. Modifying an assignment is equivalent to doing the assignment and then modifying the variable that was assigned to. Which is genuinely so useful for modifying a copy of something, like this:

($tmp = $global) =~ tr/13579/24680/;

Although as of 5.14, that can also be accomplished this way:

use v5.14;
$tmp = ($global =~  tr/13579/24680/r);

Likewise,

($x += 2) *= 3;

is equivalent to

$x += 2;
$x *= 3;

Similarly, a list assignment in list context produces the list of lvalues assigned to, and a list assignment in scalar context returns the number of elements produced by the expression on the right hand side of the assignment. ✨

The three dotted bitwise assignment operators (&.=, |.=, ^.=) are new in Perl 5.22. See "Bitwise String Operators".

💬 Comma Operator 💬

Binary , is the comma operator. In scalar context it evaluates its left argument, throws that value away, then evaluates its right argument and returns that value. Literally just like C's comma operator.

In list context, it's just the list argument separator, and inserts both its arguments into the list. These arguments are also evaluated from left to right.

The => operator (sometimes pronounced "fat comma") is a synonym for the comma — except that it causes a word on its left to be interpreted as a string if it begins with a letter or underscore and is composed only of letters, digits and underscores. This includes operands that might otherwise be interpreted as operators, constants, single number v-strings or function calls. If in doubt about this behavior, the left operand can be quoted explicitly.

Otherwise, the => operator behaves exactly as the comma operator or list argument separator, according to context.

For example:

use constant FOO => "something";

my %h = ( FOO => 23 );

is equivalent to:

my %h = ("FOO", 23);

It is NOT:

my %h = ("something", 23);

The => operator is helpful in documenting the correspondence between keys and values in hashes, and other paired elements in lists. 🫶

%hash = ( $key => $value );
login( $username => $password );

The special quoting behavior ignores precedence, and hence may apply to part of the left operand:

print time.shift => "bbb";

That example prints something like "1314363215shiftbbb", because the => implicitly quotes the shift immediately on its left, ignoring the fact that time.shift is the entire left operand. 💀

➡️ List Operators (Rightward) ⬅️

On the right side of a list operator, the comma has very low precedence, such that it controls all comma-separated expressions found there. The only operators with lower precedence are the logical operators and, or, and not, which may be used to evaluate calls to list operators without the need for parentheses:

open HANDLE, "< :encoding(UTF-8)", "filename"
    or die "Can't open: $!\n";

However, some people find that code harder to read than writing it with parentheses:

open(HANDLE, "< :encoding(UTF-8)", "filename")
    or die "Can't open: $!\n";

in which case you might as well just use the more customary || operator:

open(HANDLE, "< :encoding(UTF-8)", "filename")
    || die "Can't open: $!\n";

See also discussion of list operators in "Terms and List Operators (Leftward)".

🚫 Logical Not 🚫

Unary not returns the logical negation of the expression to its right. It's the equivalent of ! except for the very low precedence.

🎀 Logical And 🎀

Binary and returns the logical conjunction of the two surrounding expressions. It's equivalent to && except for the very low precedence. This means that it short-circuits: the right expression is evaluated only if the left expression is true.

🔀 Logical or and Exclusive Or 🔀

There is no low precedence operator for defined-OR. Noted, bestie.

Binary or returns the logical inclusive disjunction of the two surrounding expressions. It's equivalent to || except for it having very low precedence. This makes it useful for control flow:

print FH $data              or die "Can't write to FH: $!";

This means that it short-circuits: the right expression is evaluated only if the left expression is false. Due to its precedence, you must be careful to avoid using it as replacement for the || operator. It usually works out better for flow control than in assignments:

$x = $y or $z;              # bug: this is wrong
($x = $y) or $z;            # really means this
$x = $y || $z;              # better written this way

However, when it's a list-context assignment and you're trying to use || for control flow, you probably need or so that the assignment takes higher precedence.

@info = stat($file) || die;     # oops, scalar sense of stat!
@info = stat($file) or die;     # better, now @info gets its due

Then again, you could always use parentheses. 🙈

Binary xor returns the logical exclusive disjunction of the two surrounding expressions. That means it returns "true" if either, but not both, are true. It's equivalent to ^^ except for it having very low precedence. It cannot short-circuit (of course). It tends to be used to verify that two mutually-exclusive conditions are actually mutually exclusive. For example, in Perl's test suite, we might want to test that a regular expression pattern can't both match and not match, for otherwise it would be a bug in our pattern matching code.

 ($x =~ qr/$pat/ xor $x !~ qr/$pat/) or die;

💀 C Operators Missing From Perl 💀

Here's what C has that Perl doesn't:

unary & — Address-of operator. (But see the \ operator for taking a reference.)
unary * — Dereference-address operator. (Perl's prefix dereferencing operators are typed: $, @, %, and &.)
(TYPE) — Type-casting operator.

🎀 Quote and Quote-like Operators 🎀

While we usually think of quotes as literal values, in Perl they function as operators, providing various kinds of interpolating and pattern matching capabilities. Perl provides customary quote characters for these behaviors, but also provides a way for you to choose your quote character for any of them. In the following table, a {} represents any pair of delimiters you choose.

Customary  Generic        Meaning        Interpolates
    ''       q{}          Literal             no
    ""      qq{}          Literal             yes
    ``      qx{}          Command             yes*
            qw{}         Word list            no
    //       m{}       Pattern match          yes*
            qr{}          Pattern             yes*
             s{}{}      Substitution          yes*
            tr{}{}    Transliteration         no (but see below)
             y{}{}    Transliteration         no (but see below)
    <<EOF                 here-doc            yes*

    * unless the delimiter is ''.

Non-bracketing delimiters use the same character fore and aft, but the four sorts of ASCII brackets (round, angle, square, curly) all nest, which means that

q{foo{bar}baz}

is the same as

'foo{bar}baz'

Note, however, that this does not always work for quoting Perl code:

$s = q{ if ($x eq "}") ... }; # WRONG

is a syntax error. The Text::Balanced module (standard as of v5.8, and from CPAN before then) is able to do this properly. Slay. 💅

If the extra_paired_delimiters feature is enabled, then Perl will additionally recognise a variety of Unicode characters as being paired. For a full list, see the "List of Extra Paired Delimiters" at the end of this document.

There can (and in some cases, must) be whitespace between the operator and the quoting characters, except when # is being used as the quoting character. q#foo# is parsed as the string foo, while q #foo# is the operator q followed by a comment. Its argument will be taken from the next line. This allows you to write:

s {foo}  # Replace foo
  {bar}  # with bar.

The cases where whitespace must be used are when the quoting character is a word character (meaning it matches /\w/):

q XfooX # Works: means the string 'foo'
qXfooX  # WRONG!

The following escape sequences are available in constructs that interpolate, and in transliterations whose delimiters aren't single quotes ('). In all the ones with braces, any number of blanks and/or tabs adjoining and within the braces are allowed (and ignored). ✨

\t — tab (HT, TAB)
\n — newline (NL)
\r — return (CR)
\f — form feed (FF)
\b — backspace (BS)
\a — alarm (bell) (BEL)
\e — escape (ESC)
\x{263A} — note [1,8] — hex char (example shown: SMILEY)
\x{ 263A } — Same, but shows optional blanks inside and adjoining the braces
\x1b — note [2,8] — restricted range hex char (example: ESC)
\N{name} — note [3] — named Unicode character or character sequence
\N{U+263D} — note [4,8] — Unicode character (example: FIRST QUARTER MOON)
\c[ — note [5] — control char (example: chr(27))
\o{23072} — note [6,8] — octal char (example: SMILEY)
\033 — note [7,8] — restricted range octal char (example: ESC)

Note that any escape sequence using braces inside interpolated constructs may have optional blanks (tab or space characters) adjoining with and inside of the braces, as illustrated above by the second \x{ } example. 🦋

[1] The result is the character specified by the hexadecimal number between the braces. See [8] below for details on which character.

Blanks (tab or space characters) may separate the number from either or both of the braces.

Otherwise, bestie, only hexadecimal digits are valid between the braces. If an invalid character is encountered, a warning will be issued and the invalid character and all subsequent characters (valid or invalid) within the braces will be discarded. 😭

If there are no valid digits between the braces, the generated character is the NULL character ("\x{00}"). However, an explicit empty brace ("\x{}") will not cause a warning (currently). 💅

[2] — The result is the character specified by the hexadecimal number in the range 0x00 to 0xFF. See "[8]" below for details on which character.

Only hexadecimal digits are valid following "\x". When "\x" is followed by fewer than two valid digits, any valid digits will be zero-padded. This means that "\x7" will be interpreted as "\x07", and a lone "\x" will be interpreted as "\x00". Except at the end of a string, having fewer than two valid digits will result in a warning. Note that although the warning says the illegal character is ignored, it is only ignored as part of the escape and will still be used as the subsequent character in the string. For example:

Original    Result    Warns?
"\x7"       "\x07"    no
"\x"        "\x00"    no
"\x7q"      "\x07q"   yes
"\xq"       "\x00q"   yes

[3] — The result is the Unicode character or character sequence given by name. See charnames. 🦋

[4] — "\N{U+hexadecimal number}" means the Unicode character whose Unicode code point is hexadecimal number. ✨

[5] — The character following "\c" is mapped to some other character as shown in the table:

Sequence   Value
  \c@      chr(0)
  \cA      chr(1)
  \ca      chr(1)
  \cB      chr(2)
  \cb      chr(2)
  ...
  \cZ      chr(26)
  \cz      chr(26)
  \c[      chr(27)
                    # See below for chr(28)
  \c]      chr(29)
  \c^      chr(30)
  \c_      chr(31)
  \c?      chr(127) # (on ASCII platforms; see below for link to
                    #  EBCDIC discussion)

In other words, it's the character whose code point has had 64 xor'd with its uppercase. "\c?" is DELETE on ASCII platforms because ord("?") ^ 64 is 127, and "\c@" is NULL because the ord of "@" is 64, so xor'ing 64 itself produces 0. math girlies rise 🧚

Also, "\c\X" yields " chr(28) . "X"" for any X, but cannot come at the end of a string, because the backslash would be parsed as escaping the end quote. 🙈

On ASCII platforms, the resulting characters from the list above are the complete set of ASCII controls. This isn't the case on EBCDIC platforms; see "OPERATOR DIFFERENCES" in perlebcdic for a full discussion of the differences between these for ASCII versus EBCDIC platforms.

Use of any other character following the "c" besides those listed above is discouraged, and as of Perl v5.20, the only characters actually allowed are the printable ASCII ones, minus the left brace "{". What happens for any of the allowed other characters is that the value is derived by xor'ing with the seventh bit, which is 64, and a warning raised if enabled. Using the non-allowed characters generates a fatal error. 💀

To get platform independent controls, you can use "\N{...}".

[6] — The result is the character specified by the octal number between the braces. See "[8]" below for details on which character.

Blanks (tab or space characters) may separate the number from either or both of the braces.

Otherwise, if a character that isn't an octal digit is encountered, a warning is raised, and the value is based on the octal digits before it, discarding it and all following characters up to the closing brace. It is a fatal error if there are no octal digits at all. 😭

[7] — The result is the character specified by the three-digit octal number in the range 000 to 777 (but best to not use above 077, see next paragraph). See "[8]" below for details on which character.

Some contexts allow 2 or even 1 digit, but any usage without exactly three digits, the first being a zero, may give unintended results. (For example, in a regular expression it may be confused with a backreference; see "Octal escapes" in perlrebackslash.) Starting in Perl 5.14, you may use "\o{}" instead, which avoids all these problems. Otherwise, it is best to use this construct only for ordinals "\077" and below, remembering to pad to the left with zeros to make three digits. For larger ordinals, either use "\o{}", or convert to something else, such as to hex and use "\N{U+}" (which is portable between platforms with different character sets) or "\x{}" instead. slay 💅

[8] — Several constructs above specify a character by a number. That number gives the character's position in the character set encoding (indexed from 0). This is called synonymously its ordinal, code position, or code point. Perl works on platforms that have a native encoding currently of either ASCII/Latin1 or EBCDIC, each of which allow specification of 256 characters. In general, if the number is 255 (0xFF, 0377) or below, Perl interprets this in the platform's native encoding. If the number is 256 (0x100, 0400) or above, Perl interprets it as a Unicode code point and the result is the corresponding Unicode character. For example "\x{50}" and "\o{120}" both are the number 80 in decimal, which is less than 256, so the number is interpreted in the native character set encoding. In ASCII the character in the 80th position (indexed from 0) is the letter "P", and in EBCDIC it is the ampersand symbol "&". "\x{100}" and "\o{400}" are both 256 in decimal, so the number is interpreted as a Unicode code point no matter what the native encoding is. The name of the character in the 256th position (indexed by 0) in Unicode is "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH MACRON". ✨

An exception to the above rule is that "\N{U+hex number}" is always interpreted as a Unicode code point, so that "\N{U+0050}" is "P" even on EBCDIC platforms. 👑

NOTE: Unlike C and other languages, Perl has no "\v" escape sequence for the vertical tab (VT, which is 11 in both ASCII and EBCDIC), but you may use "\N{VT}", "\ck", "\N{U+0b}", or "\x0b". ("\v" does have meaning in regular expression patterns in Perl, see perlre.)

The following escape sequences are available in constructs that interpolate, but not in transliterations.

\l          lowercase next character only
\u          titlecase (not uppercase!) next character only
\L          lowercase all characters till \E or end of string
\U          uppercase all characters till \E or end of string
\F          foldcase all characters till \E or end of string
\Q          quote (disable) pattern metacharacters till \E or
            end of string
\E          end either case modification or quoted section
            (whichever was last seen)

See "quotemeta" in perlfunc for the exact definition of characters that are quoted by "\Q".

"\L", "\U", "\F", and "\Q" can stack, in which case you need one "\E" for each. For example:

say "This \Qquoting \ubusiness \Uhere isn't\E done yet,\E is it?";
This quoting Business HERE ISN'T done yet, is it?

If a "use locale" form that includes "LC_CTYPE" is in effect (see perllocale), the case map used by "\l", "\L", "\u", and "\U" is taken from the current locale. If Unicode (for example, "\N{}" or code points of 0x100 or beyond) is being used, the case map used by "\l", "\L", "\u", and "\U" is as defined by Unicode. That means that case-mapping a single character can sometimes produce a sequence of several characters. Under "use locale", "\F" produces the same results as "\L" for all locales but a UTF-8 one, where it instead uses the Unicode definition.

All systems use the virtual "\n" to represent a line terminator, called a "newline". There is no such thing as an unvarying, physical newline character. It is only an illusion that the operating system, device drivers, C libraries, and Perl all conspire to preserve. Not all systems read "\r" as ASCII CR and "\n" as ASCII LF. For example, on the ancient Macs (pre-MacOS X) of yesteryear, these used to be reversed, and on systems without a line terminator, printing "\n" might emit no actual data. In general, use "\n" when you mean a "newline" for your system, but use the literal ASCII when you need an exact character. For example, most networking protocols expect and prefer a CR+LF ("\015\012" or "\cM\cJ") for line terminators, and although they often accept just "\012", they seldom tolerate just "\015". If you get in the habit of using "\n" for networking, you may be burned some day. 🔥

For constructs that do interpolate, variables beginning with "$" or "@" are interpolated. Subscripted variables such as $a[3] or "$href->{key}[0]" are also interpolated, as are array and hash slices. But method calls such as "$obj->meth" are not.

Interpolating an array or slice interpolates the elements in order, separated by the value of $", so is equivalent to interpolating "join $", @array". "Punctuation" arrays such as "@*" are usually interpolated only if the name is enclosed in braces "@{*}", but the arrays @_, "@+", and "@-" are interpolated even without braces. 🎀

For double-quoted strings, the quoting from "\Q" is applied after interpolation and escapes are processed.

"abc\Qfoo\tbar$s\Exyz"

is equivalent to

"abc" . quotemeta("foo\tbar$s") . "xyz"

For the pattern of regex operators ("qr//", "m//" and "s///"), the quoting from "\Q" is applied after interpolation is processed, but before escapes are processed. This allows the pattern to match literally (except for "$" and "@"). For example, the following matches:

'\s\t' =~ /\Q\s\t/

Because "$" or "@" trigger interpolation, you'll need to use something like "/\Quser\E\@\Qhost/" to match them literally. iykyk 💅

Patterns are subject to an additional level of interpretation as a regular expression. This is done as a second pass, after variables are interpolated, so that regular expressions may be incorporated into the pattern from the variables. If this is not what you want, use "\Q" to interpolate a variable literally. ✨

okay so plot twist bestie 💀 — apart from all the behavior we just described, Perl does not expand multiple levels of interpolation. And here's the part that breaks every shell programmer's brain: back-quotes do NOT interpolate within double quotes. Not even a little. And single quotes do not stop variables from being evaluated when they show up inside double quotes. The rules are different here. Accept it. 🫶

✨ Simpler Quote-Like Operators ✨

💖 `q/STRING/`, `'STRING'` 💖

A single-quoted, literal string. No vibes, no interpolation, just the raw text. A backslash is just a backslash… unless it's followed by the delimiter or another backslash, in which case the delimiter or the backslash gets interpolated. That's the whole rule, periodt.

$foo = q!I said, "You said, 'She said it.'"!;
$bar = q('This is it.');
$baz = '\n';                # a two-character string

🎀 `qq/STRING/`, `"STRING"` 🎀

A double-quoted, interpolated string. The classic. She interpolates. She's doing the most.

$_ .= qq
 (*** The previous line contains the naughty word "$1".\n)
            if /\b(tcl|java|python)\b/i;      # :-)
$baz = "\n";                # a one-character string

🦋 `qx/STRING/`, `STRING` 🦋

A string that's (possibly) interpolated and then executed as a system command, via /bin/sh or its equivalent if that's needed. Shell wildcards, pipes, and redirections all get honored, no cap. Just like system, if the string has no shell metacharacters in it, it runs directly instead. The collected standard output of the command comes back to you; standard error is left completely alone. In scalar context you get a single (potentially multi-line) string — or undef if the shell (or the command) couldn't even be started. In list context you get a list of lines (however you've defined lines with $/ or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR), or an empty list if the shell (or command) couldn't be started. iykyk.

print qx/date/; # prints "Sun Jan 28 06:16:19 CST 2024"

Because backticks don't touch standard error, if you do care about stderr you gotta use shell file descriptor syntax (assuming your shell supports it). To capture a command's STDERR and STDOUT together:

$output = `cmd 2>&1`;

To capture a command's STDOUT but yeet its STDERR into the void:

$output = `cmd 2>/dev/null`;

To capture a command's STDERR but discard its STDOUT (ordering is important here, don't play with me):

$output = `cmd 2>&1 1>/dev/null`;

To exchange a command's STDOUT and STDERR so you capture the STDERR but let its STDOUT come out the old STDERR:

$output = `cmd 3>&1 1>&2 2>&3 3>&-`;

To read both a command's STDOUT and its STDERR separately, it's easiest to just redirect them separately into files and then read from those files once the program is done:

system("program args 1>program.stdout 2>program.stderr");

The STDIN filehandle the command uses is inherited from Perl's STDIN. For example:

open(SPLAT, "stuff")   || die "can't open stuff: $!";
open(STDIN, "<&SPLAT") || die "can't dupe SPLAT: $!";
print STDOUT `sort`;

…will print the sorted contents of the file named "stuff". slay.

Using single-quote as the delimiter protects the command from Perl's double-quote interpolation and passes it on to the shell instead:

$perl_info  = qx(ps $$);            # that's Perl's $$
$shell_info = qx'ps $$';            # that's the new shell's $$

How that string gets evaluated is entirely up to the command interpreter on your system, so no promises. On most platforms you'll have to protect shell metacharacters if you want them treated literally — and in practice that's genuinely difficult, because it's unclear how to escape which characters. See perlsec for a clean and safe example of a manual fork() and exec() to emulate backticks safely.

On some platforms (notably DOS-like ones), the shell may not be capable of dealing with multiline commands, so putting newlines in the string may not get you what you want. You may be able to evaluate multiple commands in a single line by separating them with the command separator character, if your shell supports that — for example, ; on many Unix shells and & on the Windows NT cmd shell.

Perl will attempt to flush all files opened for output before starting the child process, but this may not be supported on some platforms (see perlport). To be safe, you may need to set $| ($AUTOFLUSH in English) or call the autoflush() method of IO::Handle on any open handles. Do it. Be safe. 💅

Beware that some command shells may place restrictions on the length of the command line. You must ensure your strings don't exceed this limit after any necessary interpolations. See the platform-specific release notes for more details about your particular environment.

Using this operator can lead to programs that are difficult to port, because the shell commands called vary between systems, and may in fact not be present at all. As one example: the type command under the POSIX shell is very different from the type command under DOS. That doesn't mean you should go out of your way to avoid backticks when they're the right way to get something done. Perl was made to be a glue language, and one of the things it glues together is commands. Just understand what you're getting yourself into, bestie. 🌈

Like system, backticks put the child process exit code in $?. If you'd like to manually inspect failure, you can check all possible failure modes by inspecting $? like this:

if ($? == -1) {
    print "failed to execute: $!\n";
}
elsif ($? & 127) {
    printf "child died with signal %d, %s coredump\n",
        ($? & 127),  ($? & 128) ? 'with' : 'without';
}
else {
    printf "child exited with value %d\n", $? >> 8;
}

Use the open pragma to control the I/O layers used when reading the output of the command, for example:

use open IN => ":encoding(UTF-8)";
my $x = `cmd-producing-utf-8`;

qx// can also be called like a function with readpipe in perlfunc. 👑

See "I/O Operators" for more discussion.

🍓 `qw/STRING/` 🍓

Evaluates to a list of the words extracted out of STRING, using embedded whitespace as the word delimiters. You can think of it as being roughly equivalent to:

split(" ", q/STRING/);

The differences being that it only splits on ASCII whitespace, it generates a real list at compile time, and in scalar context it returns the last element in the list. So this expression:

qw(foo bar baz)

is semantically equivalent to the list:

"foo", "bar", "baz"

Some frequently seen examples:

use POSIX qw( setlocale localeconv )
@EXPORT = qw( foo bar baz );

A common mistake — and bestie, we've all done it 🙈 — is trying to separate the words with commas, or putting comments into a multi-line qw-string. For this reason, the use warnings pragma and the -w switch (that is, the $^W variable) produces warnings if the STRING contains the "," or the "#" character.

🔥 Regexp Quote-Like Operators 🔥

Here are the quote-like operators that apply to pattern matching and related activities. This is the main character section, fr fr.

👑 `qr/STRING/msixpodualn` 👑

This operator quotes (and possibly compiles) its STRING as a regular expression. STRING is interpolated the same way as PATTERN in m/PATTERN/. If "'" is used as the delimiter, no variable interpolation is done. It returns a Perl value which may be used instead of the corresponding /STRING/msixpodualn expression. The returned value is a normalized version of the original pattern. It magically differs from a string containing the same characters: ref(qr/x/) returns "Regexp"; however, dereferencing it is not well defined (you currently get the normalized version of the original pattern, but this may change). So don't go poking at its internals, okay?

For example,

$rex = qr/my.STRING/is;
print $rex;                 # prints (?si-xm:my.STRING)
s/$rex/foo/;

is equivalent to

s/my.STRING/foo/is;

The result may be used as a subpattern in a match:

$re = qr/$pattern/;
$string =~ /foo${re}bar/;   # can be interpolated in other
                            # patterns
$string =~ $re;             # or used standalone
$string =~ /$re/;           # or this way

Since Perl may compile the pattern at the moment of execution of the qr() operator, using qr() may have speed advantages in some situations — notably if the result of qr() is used standalone:

sub match {
    my $patterns = shift;
    my @compiled = map qr/$_/i, @$patterns;
    grep {
        my $success = 0;
        foreach my $pat (@compiled) {
            $success = 1, last if /$pat/;
        }
        $success;
    } @_;
}

Precompilation of the pattern into an internal representation at the moment of qr() avoids the need to recompile the pattern every time a match /$pat/ is attempted. (Perl has many other internal optimizations, but none would be triggered in the above example if we did not use the qr() operator.) So like… free performance? We love that for us. 💅

Options (specified by the following modifiers) are:

m — Treat string as multiple lines.
s — Treat string as single line. (Make . match a newline)
i — Do case-insensitive pattern matching.
x — Use extended regular expressions; specifying two x's means \t and the SPACE character are ignored within square-bracketed character classes
p — When matching preserve a copy of the matched string so that ${^PREMATCH}, ${^MATCH}, ${^POSTMATCH} will be defined (ignored starting in v5.20 as these are always defined starting in that release)
o — Compile pattern only once.
a — ASCII-restrict: Use ASCII for \d, \s, \w and [[:posix:]] character classes; specifying two a's adds the further restriction that no ASCII character will match a non-ASCII one under /i.
l — Use the current run-time locale's rules.
u — Use Unicode rules.
d — Use Unicode or native charset, as in 5.12 and earlier.
n — Non-capture mode. Don't let () fill in $1, $2, etc...

So if a precompiled pattern gets embedded inside a bigger pattern, the whole "msixpluadn" situation gets propagated appropriately, like it's catching the vibe of the outer pattern. But the effect of the /o modifier? Nah, that does not propagate — it stays locked to the patterns that explicitly typed it out. 🙅‍♀️

The /a, /d, /l, and /u modifiers (they arrived in Perl 5.14, so they're basically elders) are the ones running the character set rules, but bestie, /a is genuinely the only one you're likely to ever want to specify yourself — the other three get auto-selected for you by various pragmas. Slay. ✨

Peep perlre for extra info on what counts as valid syntax for STRING, and for the full detailed look at how regexes actually behave semantically. In particular, every modifier except the largely obsolete /o gets further explained in "Modifiers" in perlre. And /o? It gets its very own spotlight in the next section. 💅

💖 `"m/PATTERN/msixpodualngc"` 💖

🦋 `"/PATTERN/msixpodualngc"` 🦋

Searches a string for a pattern match, and in scalar context it hands you back true if it succeeds and false if it fails. If no string got specified via the =~ or !~ operator, then the $_ string is the one getting searched. (Heads up: the string you specify with =~ does not have to be an lvalue — it can totally be the result of an expression evaluation, but remember that =~ binds pretty tightly.) See also perlre. 📖

Options are exactly as described in "qr//" above; and on top of those, these match process modifiers are available:

g — Match globally, i.e., find all the occurrences.
c — Do not reset the search position on a failed match when /g is in effect.

If / is the delimiter, then that initial m is optional. With the m you can use any pair of non-whitespace (ASCII) characters as your delimiters. This is lowkey iconic for matching path names that contain /, because it saves you from LTS (leaning toothpick syndrome 🦷). If ? is the delimiter, then a match-only-once rule applies, which is described in "m?PATTERN?" below. And if ' (single quote) is the delimiter, no variable interpolation is performed on the PATTERN. Also: when you're using a delimiter character that's valid in an identifier, whitespace is required after the m.

PATTERN may contain variables, and those get interpolated every single time the pattern search is evaluated — except when the delimiter is a single quote. (Note that $(, $), and $| are not interpolated, because they look like end-of-string tests. 🙈) Perl will not recompile the pattern unless an interpolated variable inside it changes. You can force Perl to skip the test and never recompile by slapping a /o (which stands for "once") after the trailing delimiter. Once upon a time 🕰️, Perl would recompile regular expressions unnecessarily, and this modifier was actually useful for telling it not to, in the interests of speed. But now? The only reasons to use /o are one of:

The variables are thousands of characters long and you know they don't change, and you need to wring out that last little bit of speed by having Perl skip testing for that. (There is a maintenance penalty for doing this, since mentioning /o constitutes a promise that you won't change the variables in the pattern. And if you do change them, Perl won't even notice. 💀)
You want the pattern to use the initial values of the variables regardless of whether they change or not. (But there are saner ways of accomplishing this than using /o.)
If the pattern contains embedded code, like this:

use re 'eval';
$code = 'foo(?{ $x })';
/$code/

then perl will recompile each time, even though the pattern string hasn't changed, to make sure the current value of $x is seen each time. Use /o if you want to avoid this.

The bottom line, bestie: using /o is almost never a good idea. Periodt. 🚫

🌸 The empty pattern `//` 🌸

If the PATTERN evaluates to the empty string, then the last successfully matched regular expression in the current dynamic scope is used instead (see also "Scoping Rules of Regex Variables" in perlvar). In that case, only the g and c flags on the empty pattern are honored — every other flag is taken from the original pattern. And if no match has previously succeeded, this will (silently 🤫) act instead as a genuine empty pattern, which will always match. Using a user-supplied string as a pattern carries the risk that if that string is empty, it triggers the "last successful match" behavior, which can be very confusing. In those cases you're recommended to replace m/$pattern/ with m/(?:$pattern)/ to dodge that behavior entirely. 🫶

That last successful pattern can also be accessed as a variable via ${^LAST_SUCCESSFUL_PATTERN}. Matching against it, or against the empty pattern, should have the same effect — with the exception that when there's no last successful pattern, the empty pattern will silently match, whereas using the ${^LAST_SUCCESSFUL_PATTERN} variable will produce undefined warnings (if warnings are enabled). You can check defined(${^LAST_SUCCESSFUL_PATTERN}) to test whether there's a "last successful match" in the current scope.

Not me warning you that it's possible to confuse Perl into thinking // (the empty regex) is actually // (the defined-or operator). 😭 Perl is usually pretty good about this, but some pathological cases might trigger it, like $x/// (is that ($x) / (//) or $x // /?) and print $fh // (print $fh(// or print($fh //?). In all of these examples, Perl will assume you meant defined-or. If you actually meant the empty regex, just use parentheses or spaces to disambiguate, or even prefix the empty regex with an m (so // becomes m//).

💜 Matching in list context 💜

If the /g option is not used, then m// in list context returns a list consisting of the subexpressions matched by the parentheses in the pattern, that is, ($1, $2, $3...) (note that here $1 etc. are also set). When there are no parentheses in the pattern, the return value is the list (1) for success. With or without parentheses, an empty list is returned upon failure.

Examples, bestie:

open(TTY, "+</dev/tty")
   || die "can't access /dev/tty: $!";

<TTY> =~ /^y/i && foo();       # do foo if desired

if (/Version: *([0-9.]*)/) { $version = $1; }

next if m#^/usr/spool/uucp#;

# poor man's grep
$arg = shift;
while (<>) {
   print if /$arg/;
}
if (($F1, $F2, $Etc) = ($foo =~ /^(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s*(.*)/))

That last example splits $foo into the first two words and the remainder of the line, and assigns those three fields to $F1, $F2, and $Etc. The conditional is true if any variables were assigned — that is, if the pattern matched. ✨

The /g modifier specifies global pattern matching — meaning, matching as many times as possible within the string. How it behaves depends on the context, no cap:

In list context, it returns a list of the substrings matched by any capturing parentheses in the regular expression. If there are no parentheses, it returns a list of all the matched strings, as if there were parentheses wrapped around the whole entire pattern.
In scalar context, each execution of m//g finds the next match, returning true if it matches and false if there's no further match. The position after the last match can be read or set using the pos() function; see "pos" in perlfunc. A failed match normally resets the search position back to the beginning of the string, but you can avoid that by adding the /c modifier (for example, m//gc). Modifying the target string also resets the search position. 🎯

✨ `\G` assertion ✨

You can intermix m//g matches with m/\G.../g, where \G is a zero-width assertion that matches the exact position where the previous m//g, if any, left off. Without the /g modifier, the \G assertion still anchors at pos() as it was at the start of the operation (see "pos" in perlfunc), but the match is of course only attempted once. Using \G without /g on a target string that has never had a /g match applied to it is the same as using the \A assertion to match the beginning of the string. Also note that, currently, \G is only properly supported when it's anchored at the very beginning of the pattern. 👑

Examples:

# list context
($one,$five,$fifteen) = (`uptime` =~ /(\d+\.\d+)/g);

# scalar context
local $/ = "";
while ($paragraph = <>) {
    while ($paragraph =~ /\p{Ll}['")]*[.!?]+['")]*\s/g) {
        $sentences++;
    }
}
say $sentences;

Here's another way to check for sentences in a paragraph:

my $sentence_rx = qr{
    (?: (?<= ^ ) | (?<= \s ) )  # after start-of-string or
                                # whitespace
    \p{Lu}                      # capital letter
    .*?                         # a bunch of anything
    (?<= \S )                   # that ends in non-
                                # whitespace
    (?<! \b [DMS]r  )           # but isn't a common abbr.
    (?<! \b Mrs )
    (?<! \b Sra )
    (?<! \b St  )
    [.?!]                       # followed by a sentence
                                # ender
    (?= $ | \s )                # in front of end-of-string
                                # or whitespace
}sx;
local $/ = "";
while (my $paragraph = <>) {
    say "NEW PARAGRAPH";
    my $count = 0;
    while ($paragraph =~ /($sentence_rx)/g) {
        printf "\tgot sentence %d: <%s>\n", ++$count, $1;
    }
}

And here's how to use m//gc with \G:

$_ = "ppooqppqq";
while ($i++ < 2) {
    print "1: '";
    print $1 while /(o)/gc; print "', pos=", pos, "\n";
    print "2: '";
    print $1 if /\G(q)/gc;  print "', pos=", pos, "\n";
    print "3: '";
    print $1 while /(p)/gc; print "', pos=", pos, "\n";
}
print "Final: '$1', pos=",pos,"\n" if /\G(.)/;

and bestie, the last example is supposed to spit out:

1: 'oo', pos=4
2: 'q', pos=5
3: 'pp', pos=7
1: '', pos=7
2: 'q', pos=8
3: '', pos=8
Final: 'q', pos=8

Okay so clock the tea: that final match matched "q" instead of "p" — which a match without the "\G" anchor would've done instead. And also? That final match did not update "pos". "pos" only gets updated on a "/g" match, periodt. So if your final match did match "p"... yeah, it's a good bet you're running some ancient (pre-5.6.0) version of Perl. 💀

A useful idiom for "lex"-like scanners is "/\G.../gc". You can combine several regexps like this to process a string part-by-part, doing different actions depending on which regexp matched. Each regexp tries to match where the previous one leaves off. It's giving ✨assembly line✨.

$_ = <<'EOL';
    $url = URI::URL->new( "http://example.com/" );
    die if $url eq "xXx";
EOL

LOOP: {
    print(" digits"),       redo LOOP if /\G\d+\b[,.;]?\s*/gc;
    print(" lowercase"),    redo LOOP
                                  if /\G\p{Ll}+\b[,.;]?\s*/gc;
    print(" UPPERCASE"),    redo LOOP
                                  if /\G\p{Lu}+\b[,.;]?\s*/gc;
    print(" Capitalized"),  redo LOOP
                            if /\G\p{Lu}\p{Ll}+\b[,.;]?\s*/gc;
    print(" MiXeD"),        redo LOOP
                                 if /\G\pL+\b[,.;]?\s*/gc;
    print(" alphanumeric"), redo LOOP
                          if /\G[\p{Alpha}\pN]+\b[,.;]?\s*/gc;
    print(" line-noise"),   redo LOOP if /\G\W+/gc;
    print ". That's all!\n";
}

Here's the output (split into several lines):

line-noise lowercase line-noise UPPERCASE line-noise UPPERCASE
line-noise lowercase line-noise lowercase line-noise lowercase
lowercase line-noise lowercase lowercase line-noise lowercase
lowercase line-noise MiXeD line-noise. That's all!

💅 `m?PATTERN?msixpodualngc`

Okay so this is literally just like the m/PATTERN/ search, except it matches only once between calls to the reset() operator. It's a genuinely useful optimization when you wanna see only the first occurrence of something in each file of a set of files, for instance. Heads up though: only m?? patterns local to the current package are reset. 👑

while (<>) {
    if (m?^$?) {
                        # blank line between header and body
    }
} continue {
    reset if eof;       # clear m?? status for next file
}

Another example — this one switched the first "latin1" encoding it finds to "utf8" in a pod file:

s//utf8/ if m? ^ =encoding \h+ \K latin1 ?x;

The match-once behavior is controlled by the match delimiter being "?" — with any other delimiter this is the normal m// operator. Simple as.

And, history lesson: in the past, the leading "m" in m?PATTERN? was optional, but omitting it would produce a deprecation warning. As of v5.22.0, omitting it produces a syntax error. 🚨 So if you encounter this construct in older code, you can just add m. That's it. That's the fix.

💅 `s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/msixpodualngcer`

Searches a string for a pattern, and if found, replaces that pattern with the replacement text and returns the number of substitutions made. Otherwise it returns false (a value that is both an empty string ("") and numeric zero (0) as described in "Relational Operators"). Iconic little liar — false is doing double duty.

If the /r (non-destructive) option is used then it runs the substitution on a copy of the string and instead of returning the number of substitutions, it returns the copy whether or not a substitution occurred. The original string is never changed when /r is used. And the copy will always be a plain string, even if the input is an object or a tied variable. No strings attached, literally. 🦋

If no string is specified via the =~ or !~ operator, the $_ variable is searched and modified. Unless the /r option is used, the string specified must be a scalar variable, an array element, a hash element, or an assignment to one of those — that is, some sort of scalar lvalue. So like, it has to be a real assignable thing, bestie, no vibes-only values.

If the delimiter chosen is a single quote, no variable interpolation is done on either the PATTERN or the REPLACEMENT. Otherwise, if the PATTERN contains a $ that looks like a variable rather than an end-of-string test, the variable will be interpolated into the pattern at run-time. If you want the pattern compiled only once the first time the variable is interpolated, use the /o option. If the pattern evaluates to the empty string, the last successfully executed regular expression is used instead. See perlre for further explanation on these.

Options are as with m// with the addition of the following replacement specific options:

e — Evaluate the right side as an expression.
ee — Evaluate the right side as a string then eval the result.
r — Return substitution and leave the original string untouched.

Any non-whitespace delimiter may replace the slashes. Add space after the s when using a character allowed in identifiers. If single quotes are used, no interpretation is done on the replacement string (the /e modifier overrides this, however). Note that Perl treats backticks as normal delimiters; the replacement text is not evaluated as a command. If the PATTERN is delimited by bracketing quotes, the REPLACEMENT has its own pair of quotes, which may or may not be bracketing quotes, for example, s(foo)(bar) or s<foo>/bar/. A /e will cause the replacement portion to be treated as a full-fledged Perl expression and evaluated right then and there. It is, however, syntax checked at compile-time. A second e modifier will cause the replacement portion to be evaled before being run as a Perl expression. 🤯

Examples:

s/\bgreen\b/mauve/g;              # don't change wintergreen

$path =~ s|/usr/bin|/usr/local/bin|;

s/Login: $foo/Login: $bar/; # run-time pattern

($foo = $bar) =~ s/this/that/;      # copy first, then
                                    # change
($foo = "$bar") =~ s/this/that/;    # convert to string,
                                    # copy, then change
$foo = $bar =~ s/this/that/r;       # Same as above using /r
$foo = $bar =~ s/this/that/r
            =~ s/that/the other/r;  # Chained substitutes
                                    # using /r
@foo = map { s/this/that/r } @bar   # /r is very useful in
                                    # maps

$count = ($paragraph =~ s/Mister\b/Mr./g);  # get change-cnt

$_ = 'abc123xyz';
s/\d+/$&*2/e;               # yields 'abc246xyz'
s/\d+/sprintf("%5d",$&)/e;  # yields 'abc  246xyz'
s/\w/$& x 2/eg;             # yields 'aabbcc  224466xxyyzz'

s/%(.)/$percent{$1}/g;      # change percent escapes; no /e
s/%(.)/$percent{$1} || $&/ge;       # expr now, so /e
s/^=(\w+)/pod($1)/ge;       # use function call

$_ = 'abc123xyz';
$x = s/abc/def/r;           # $x is 'def123xyz' and
                            # $_ remains 'abc123xyz'.

# expand variables in $_, but dynamics only, using
# symbolic dereferencing
s/\$(\w+)/${$1}/g;

# Add one to the value of any numbers in the string
s/(\d+)/1 + $1/eg;

# Titlecase words in the last 30 characters only (presuming
# that the substring doesn't start in the middle of a word)
substr($str, -30) =~ s/\b(\p{Alpha})(\p{Alpha}*)\b/\u$1\L$2/g;

# This will expand any embedded scalar variable
# (including lexicals) in $_ : First $1 is interpolated
# to the variable name, and then evaluated
s/(\$\w+)/$1/eeg;

# Delete (most) C comments.
$program =~ s {
    /\*     # Match the opening delimiter.
    .*?     # Match a minimal number of characters.
    \*/     # Match the closing delimiter.
} []gsx;

s/^\s*(.*?)\s*$/$1/;        # trim whitespace in $_,
                            # expensively

for ($variable) {           # trim whitespace in $variable,
                            # cheap
    s/^\s+//;
    s/\s+$//;
}

s/([^ ]*) *([^ ]*)/$2 $1/;  # reverse 1st two fields

$foo !~ s/A/a/g;    # Lowercase all A's in $foo; return
                    # 0 if any were found and changed;
                    # otherwise return 1

Bestie, note the use of "$" instead of "\" in the last example. Unlike sed, we use the <digit> form only in the left hand side. Anywhere else it's $<digit>. That's the whole rule, no cap. 🫶

Occasionally, you can't use just a "/g" to get all the changes to occur that you might want. Here are two common cases:

# put commas in the right places in an integer
1 while s/(\d)(\d\d\d)(?!\d)/$1,$2/g;

# expand tabs to 8-column spacing
1 while s/\t+/' ' x (length($&)*8 - length($`)%8)/e;

And while "s///" accepts the "/c" flag, it has no effect beyond producing a warning if warnings are enabled. So like... it's there, it does nothing, it just yells at you. 🙈

🎀 Transliteration Quote-Like Operators

the `tr` / `y` era 💅✨

"tr/SEARCHLIST/REPLACEMENTLIST/cdsr"
"y/SEARCHLIST/REPLACEMENTLIST/cdsr"

okay so these two? literally the same operator, bestie. they swap out every single occurrence of the characters in the search list (or every character not in it, if you passed the /c modifier 👀) with the positionally-matching character from the replacement list. sometimes they straight up delete stuff, depends on which modifiers you brought to the party.

unless you use /r, they hand you back the number of characters replaced or deleted. and if you didn't point at a string with =~ or !~? then bestie, they're transliterating $_. that's just how it is. 🫶

if you're a sed devotee — hi, we see you — y is provided as a synonym for tr. iconic of Perl honestly.

now. the /r (non-destructive) option? it makes a new copy of the string, transliterates the copy, and returns that copy instead of a count — whether or not anything actually got modified. the original string is always left untouched. periodt. and heads up: that new copy is always a plain string, even if your input was an object or a tied variable. no cap.

and unless you're using /r, the string you point at with =~ has to be a scalar variable, an array element, a hash element, or an assignment to one of those. in other words: an lvalue. that's the vibe check. 🎀

The characters delimiting SEARCHLIST and REPLACEMENTLIST can be any printable character, not just forward slashes. but if you use single quotes — like tr'SEARCHLIST'REPLACEMENTLIST' — then the only interpolation happening is removal of \ from pairs of \\. which means hyphens get read as literal hyphens, not as a character range. sneaky.

otherwise? a character range can be specified with a hyphen, so tr/A-J/0-9/ does the exact same replacement as tr/ACEGIBDFHJ/0246813579/. same energy, less typing. 💅

if the SEARCHLIST is delimited by bracketing quotes, the REPLACEMENTLIST has to have its own pair of quotes — and those may or may not be bracketing quotes too. like tr(aeiouy)(yuoiea) or tr[+\-*/]"ABCD". that last one is a cute little trick to visually clarify what's going on for people who are way more familiar with regex patterns than with tr, and who might think forward slash delimiters mean tr is more like a regular expression pattern than it actually is. (another option might be to use tr[...][...].)

so like — tr is not fully like bracketed character classes. it's just (significantly) more like them than it is to full patterns. for example, characters appearing more than once in either list behave differently here than in patterns. and tr lists do not allow backslashed character classes such as \d or \pL, nor variable interpolation — so $ and @ are always treated as literals. they're just vibing as themselves. 🦋

The allowed elements are literals plus \' (meaning a single quote). and if the delimiters aren't single quotes, you can also use any of the escape sequences accepted in double-quoted strings. escape sequence details are in the table near the beginning of this section. go look, it's right there. ✨

a hyphen at the beginning or end, or preceded by a backslash, is also always considered a literal. and if you wanna use a delimiter character as a character? precede it with a backslash. problem solved. 🫶

big warning, bestie: the tr operator is not equivalent to the tr(1) utility. do not come for me about this. tr[a-z][A-Z] will uppercase the 26 letters a through z, but for case changing that is not confined to ASCII, use lc, uc, lcfirst, ucfirst (all documented in perlfunc), or the substitution operator s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/ (with \U, \u, \L, and \l string-interpolation escapes in the REPLACEMENT portion).

portable ranges: the plot twist 🌈

most ranges are unportable between character sets, but certain ones signal Perl to do special handling to make them portable. there are two classes of portable ranges.

the first is any subsets of the ranges A-Z, a-z, and 0-9, when expressed as literal characters.

tr/h-k/H-K/

that capitalizes the letters h, i, j, and k and nothing else — no matter what the platform's character set is. 💅

in contrast, all of these:

tr/\x68-\x6B/\x48-\x4B/
tr/h-\x6B/H-\x4B/
tr/\x68-k/\x48-K/

do the same capitalizations as the previous example when run on ASCII platforms — but something completely different on EBCDIC ones. 😭 so be careful, okay?

the second class of portable ranges is invoked when one or both of the range's end points are expressed as \N{...}:

$string =~ tr/\N{U+20}-\N{U+7E}//d;

that removes from $string all the platform's characters which are equivalent to any of Unicode U+0020, U+0021, ... U+007D, U+007E. it's a portable range, and it has the same effect on every platform it's run on. slay. in this example, these are the ASCII printable characters — so after this runs, $string has only controls and characters which have no ASCII equivalents. ✨

but even for portable ranges, it's not generally obvious what's included without having to look things up in the manual. so a sound principle: use only ranges that both begin from, and end at, either ASCII alphabetics of equal case (b-e, B-E), or digits (1-4). anything else is unclear (and unportable unless \N{...} is used). if in doubt? spell out the character sets in full. no shame in it. 🎀

OPTIONS 💖

c — complement the SEARCHLIST.
d — delete found but unreplaced characters.
r — return the modified string instead of a count, and leave the original string untouched.
s — squash duplicate replaced characters.

if the /d modifier is specified, any characters specified by SEARCHLIST that are not found in REPLACEMENTLIST get deleted. (note that this is slightly more flexible than the behavior of some tr programs, which delete anything they find in the SEARCHLIST, period. no nuance. just deleting. 🙈)

if the /s modifier is specified, sequences of characters, all in a row, that were transliterated to the same character get squashed down to a single instance of that character.

my $x = "aaabbbca";
$x =~ tr/ab/dd/s;     # $x now is "dcd"

if the /d modifier is used, the REPLACEMENTLIST is always interpreted exactly as specified. otherwise, if the REPLACEMENTLIST is shorter than the SEARCHLIST, the final character (if any) is replicated until it's long enough. and there won't be a final character if and only if the REPLACEMENTLIST is empty — in which case REPLACEMENTLIST is copied from SEARCHLIST. an empty REPLACEMENTLIST is useful for counting characters in a class, or for squashing character sequences in a class. multi-purpose bestie. 💜

tr/abcd//            tr/abcd/abcd/
tr/abcd/AB/          tr/abcd/ABBB/
tr/abcd//d           s/[abcd]//g
tr/abcd/AB/d         (tr/ab/AB/ + s/[cd]//g)  - but run together

if the /c modifier is specified, the characters to be transliterated are the ones NOT in SEARCHLIST — it's complemented, babes. and if /d and/or /s are also specified, they apply to the complemented SEARCHLIST. recall that if REPLACEMENTLIST is empty (except under /d) a copy of SEARCHLIST is used instead. that copy is made after complementing under /c.

SEARCHLIST is sorted by code point order after complementing, and any REPLACEMENTLIST is applied to that sorted result. which means: under /c, the order of the characters specified in SEARCHLIST is irrelevant. this can lead to different results on EBCDIC systems if REPLACEMENTLIST contains more than one character — hence it's generally non-portable to use /c with such a REPLACEMENTLIST. 😭

another way of describing the operation is this: if /c is specified, the SEARCHLIST is sorted by code point order, then complemented. if REPLACEMENTLIST is empty and /d is not specified, REPLACEMENTLIST is replaced by a copy of SEARCHLIST (as modified under /c), and these potentially modified lists are used as the basis for what follows. any character in the target string that isn't in SEARCHLIST is passed through unchanged. every other character in the target string is replaced by the character in REPLACEMENTLIST that positionally corresponds to its mate in SEARCHLIST — except that under /s, the 2nd and following characters are squeezed out in a sequence of characters in a row that all translate to the same character. and if SEARCHLIST is longer than REPLACEMENTLIST, characters in the target string that match a character in SEARCHLIST that doesn't have a correspondence in REPLACEMENTLIST are either deleted from the target string if /d is specified; or replaced by the final character in REPLACEMENTLIST if /d isn't specified. that's the whole ruleset, bestie, i promise. 🫶

examples because we love a demo 🌸</seach>

some examples:

$ARGV[1] =~ tr/A-Z/a-z/;  # canonicalize to lower case ASCII

$cnt = tr/*/*/;           # count the stars in $_
$cnt = tr/*//;            # same thing

$cnt = $sky =~ tr/*/*/;   # count the stars in $sky
$cnt = $sky =~ tr/*//;    # same thing

$cnt = $sky =~ tr/*//c;   # count all the non-stars in $sky
$cnt = $sky =~ tr/*/*/c;  # same, but transliterate each non-star
                          # into a star, leaving the already-stars
                          # alone.  Afterwards, everything in
                          # $sky is a star.

$cnt = tr/0-9//;          # count the ASCII digits in $_

tr/a-zA-Z//s;             # bookkeeper -> bokeper
tr/o/o/s;                 # bookkeeper -> bokkeeper
tr/oe/oe/s;               # bookkeeper -> bokkeper
tr/oe//s;                 # bookkeeper -> bokkeper
tr/oe/o/s;                # bookkeeper -> bokkopor

($HOST = $host) =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/;
 $HOST = $host  =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/r; # same thing

$HOST = $host =~ tr/a-z/A-Z/r # chained with s///r
              =~ s/:/ -p/r;

tr/a-zA-Z/ /cs;               # change non-alphas to single space

@stripped = map tr/a-zA-Z/ /csr, @original;
                              # /r with map

tr [\200-\377]
   [\000-\177];               # wickedly delete 8th bit

$foo !~ tr/A/a/    # transliterate all the A's in $foo to 'a',
                   # return 0 if any were found and changed.
                   # Otherwise return 1

if multiple transliterations are given for a character, only the first one is used:

tr/AAA/XYZ/

that will transliterate any A to X. first come, first served, no negotiating. 💅

and because the transliteration table is built at compile time, neither the SEARCHLIST nor the REPLACEMENTLIST are subjected to double quote interpolation. which means if you want to use variables, you must use an eval():

eval "tr/$oldlist/$newlist/";
die $@ if $@;

eval "tr/$oldlist/$newlist/, 1" or die $@;

✨ Here-docs ✨

"<<EOT"
"<<~EOT"

okay bestie, here-docs are a line-oriented form of quoting that's literally based on the shell's "here-document" syntax. After you write <<, you give a string that terminates the quoted material, and every line after the current one until that terminating string becomes the value of the item. periodt. 💅

An example is

my $endng = <<WHIMPER;
This is the way the text ends.
This is the way the text ends.
Not with a bang, but with a
WHIMPER

In this case, the terminator is an identifier, the word WHIMPER. Most usually, people capitalize the identifier, just so it stands out, but this is just a convention that isn't necessary. lowkey.

The terminator may be enclosed in quotes, as detailed below, but without them, the text of the here-doc acts exactly as if it were double-quoted. slay.

my $person = 'John';

print uc <<EOT;
Hello, $person!
And the text goes on.
EOT

This yields:

HELLO, JOHN!
AND THE TEXT GOES ON.

The parentheses in the uc function call don't have to be omitted:

print uc(<<EOT);
Hello, $person!
And the text goes on.
EOT

HELLO, JOHN!
AND THE TEXT GOES ON.

And you can intermix a here-document with other things:

print <<EOT, "Followed by the next argument\n";
Hello, $person!
And the text goes on.
EOT

Hello, John!
And the text goes on.
Followed by the next argument

And you can have multiple here-documents:

print <<EOT1, <<EOT2;
Hello, $person!
And the text goes on.
EOT1
Followed by the next argument
EOT2

Hello, John!
And the text goes on.
Followed by the next argument

The terminator doesn't have to be a single word; it may also be some quoted text:

my $pagliaci = << "La Commedia e finita!";
A troupe comes to town to perform a play, a comedy.  The lead actress
and lead actor are in an unhappy marriage.  On stage, he stabs her
for real; then he stabs her lover who has rushed from the audience to
defend her.  Both die.
La Commedia e finita!

There may not be a space between the << and the identifier unless the terminator is quoted, as demonstrated in the example just above. Quoting rules for the terminator are unrelated to Perl's quoting rules. Only "", '', and backticks can be used to quote it, NOT q(), qq(), and the like. The only interpolation is for backslashing the quoting character:

print << "abc\"def";
testing...
abc"def

The terminating string must appear by itself (unquoted and with no surrounding whitespace) on the terminating line. Also, it cannot span multiple lines. The general rule is that the identifier must be a string literal. Stick with that, and you should be safe. 🫶

Don't forget that you have to put a semicolon on the end to finish the statement, as Perl doesn't know you're not going to try to do this:

print <<ABC
10
ABC
   + 20;

which prints 30 and no line terminator.

If you want your here-doc to not have a line terminator on the final line, use chomp().

chomp($string = <<'END');
This is the first line.
This second line won't end in a \n.
END

If you use a here-doc within a delimited construct, such as in s///eg, the quoted material must still come on the line following the <<TERMINATOR marker, which means it may be inside the delimited construct:

s/this/<<E . 'that'
the other
E
 . 'more '/eg;

(It works this way as of Perl 5.18. Historically, it was inconsistent, and you would have to write

s/this/<<E . 'that'
 . 'more '/eg;
the other
E

outside of string evals.)

A problem with the Here-doc syntax given so far is that it must be at the left margin of your program, messing up the indentation. Starting in Perl v5.26, the tilde ~ modifier allows you to indent your here-docs to make the code more readable.

if ($some_var) {
    print <<~EOF;
      This is a here-doc
      EOF
}

This will print...

This is a here-doc

...with no leading whitespace.

The line containing the delimiter that marks the end of the here-doc determines the indentation template for the whole thing. Compilation croaks if any non-empty line inside the here-doc does not begin with the precise indentation of the terminating line. (An empty line consists of the single character \n.) For example, suppose the terminating line begins with a tab character followed by 4 space characters. Every non-empty line in the here-doc must begin with a tab followed by 4 spaces. They are stripped from each line, and any leading white space remaining on a line serves as the indentation for that line. Currently, only the TAB and SPACE characters are treated as whitespace for this purpose. Tabs and spaces may be mixed, but are matched exactly; tabs remain tabs and are not expanded. 💀

Additional beginning whitespace (beyond what preceded the delimiter) will be preserved:

print <<~EOF;
  This text is not indented
    This text is indented with two spaces
               This line is indented with two tabs, though those may
               have been converted to spaces by various filters by
               the time you read this.
  EOF

✨ Quoting the delimiter ✨

As mentioned above, the terminating string may be quoted. There are three types of quoting possible. The type used determines the treatment of the text. ✨

✨ Double Quotes ✨

Double quotes surrounding the terminating word or string behave as if no quotes were there, namely the text will be interpolated using exactly the same rules as normal double quoted strings, as in all the examples above. So

my $person = 'John';

print uc << "EOT";
Hello, $person!
And the text goes on.
EOT

yields:

HELLO, JOHN!
AND THE TEXT GOES ON.

which is the same result as without quotes.

✨ Single Quotes ✨

If instead, single quotes are used, the text is treated literally, with no interpolation of its content.

my $person = 'John';
print uc <<'EOT';
Hello, $person!
And the text goes on.
EOT

HELLO, $PERSON!
AND THE TEXT GOES ON.

The difference between a single-quoted here-doc and a single-quoted string is that backslashes have no special meaning in a here-doc, with \\ being treated as two backslashes and not one as they would in every other quoting construct.

Just as in the shell, a backslashed bareword following the << means the same thing as a single-quoted string does:

$cost = <<'VISTA';  # hasta la ...
That'll be $10 please, ma'am.
VISTA

$cost = <<\VISTA;   # Same thing!
That'll be $10 please, ma'am.
VISTA

These two forms are the only ways of quoting in Perl where there is no need to worry about escaping content, something that code generators can and do make good use of. 👑

✨ Backticks ✨

Finally, if instead backticks are used to quote the terminating string, the content of the here doc is treated just as it would be if it were a string embedded in backticks. Thus the content is interpolated as though it were double quoted and then executed via the shell, with the results of the execution returned.

print << `EOC`; # execute command and get results
echo hi there
EOC

✨ Gory details of parsing quoted constructs ✨

When presented with something that might have several different interpretations, Perl uses the DWIM (that's "Do What I Mean") principle to pick the most probable interpretation. This strategy is so successful that Perl programmers often do not suspect the ambiguity of what they write. But from time to time, Perl's notions differ substantially from what the author honestly meant. 😭

This section hopes to clarify how Perl handles quoted constructs. Although the most common reason to learn this is to unravel labyrinthine regular expressions, because the initial steps of parsing are the same for all quoting operators, they are all discussed together.

The most important Perl parsing rule is the first one discussed below: when processing a quoted construct, Perl first finds the end of that construct, then interprets its contents. If you understand this rule, you may skip the rest of this section on the first reading. The other rules are likely to contradict the user's expectations much less frequently than this first one.

Some passes discussed below are performed concurrently, but because their results are the same, we consider them individually. For different quoting constructs, Perl performs different numbers of passes, from one to four, but these passes are always performed in the same order.

✨ Finding the end ✨

The first pass is finding the end of the quoted construct. This results in saving to a safe location a copy of the text (between the starting and ending delimiters), normalized as necessary to avoid needing to know what the original delimiters were.

If the construct is a here-doc, the ending delimiter is a line that has a terminating string as the content. Therefore <<EOF is terminated by EOF immediately followed by \n and starting from the first column of the terminating line. When searching for the terminating line of a here-doc, nothing is skipped. In other words, lines after the here-doc syntax are compared with the terminating string line by line.

okay so like, for every construct except here-docs, it's just single characters doing double duty as your starting delimiter and your ending delimiter. If your starting delimiter is an opening punctuation — that's (, [, {, or < — then the ending delimiter is the corresponding closing punctuation, so ), ], }, or >. And if the starting delimiter is an unpaired character like /, or honestly just any closing punctuation, then the ending delimiter is literally the same as the starting one. Which is why a / terminates a qq// construct, while a ] terminates both qq[] and qq]] constructs. she contains multitudes 💅

When it's out here searching for single-character delimiters, it skips over escaped delimiters and \\. So like, if you're looking for a terminating /, any combination of \\ and \/ gets skipped. And if the delimiters are bracketing, nested pairs get skipped too. For example, while searching for a closing ] paired with the opening [, combinations of \\, \], and \[ are all skipped, and nested [ and ] are skipped as well. However — plot twist 🎀 — when backslashes are used as the delimiters themselves (like qq\\ and tr\\\), nothing gets skipped. And during the search for the end, backslashes that escape delimiters or other backslashes get removed (exactly speaking, they are not copied to the safe location).

For the constructs with three-part delimiters (s///, y///, and tr///), the search is repeated once more. If the first delimiter isn't an opening punctuation, then all three delimiters have to be the same, like s!!! and tr))) — in which case the second delimiter terminates the left part and starts the right part at once. multitasking icon ✨ If the left part is delimited by bracketing punctuation (that is (), [], {}, or <>), the right part needs another pair of delimiters, such as s(){} and tr[]//. In these cases, whitespace and comments are allowed between the two parts, although the comment must follow at least one whitespace character — otherwise a character expected as the start of the comment may be regarded as the starting delimiter of the right part. messy.

And during this whole search, no attention is paid to the semantics of the construct. So:

"$hash{"$foo/$bar"}"

or:

m/
  bar       # NOT a comment, this slash / terminated m//!
 /x

do not form legal quoted expressions. The quoted part ends on the first " and /, and the rest happens to be a syntax error. And because the slash that terminated m// was followed by a SPACE, the example above is not m//x, but rather m// with no /x modifier. So the embedded # is interpreted as a literal #. 💀

Also no attention is paid to \c\ (the multichar control char syntax) during this search. So the second \ in qq/\c\/ is interpreted as a part of \/, and the following / is not recognized as a delimiter. Instead, use \034 or \x1c at the end of quoted constructs. you're welcome bestie 🫶

✨ Interpolation ✨

The next step is interpolation in the text obtained, which is now delimiter-independent. There are multiple cases.

`<<'EOF'`

No interpolation is performed. Note that the combination \\ is left intact, since escaped delimiters are not available for here-docs.

`m''`, the pattern of `s'''`

No interpolation is performed at this stage. Any backslashed sequences including \\ are treated at the stage of "Parsing regular expressions".

`''`, `q//`, `tr'''`, `y'''`, the replacement of `s'''`

The only interpolation here is removal of \ from pairs of \\. Therefore - in tr''' and y''' is treated literally as a hyphen and no character range is available. And \1 in the replacement of s''' does not work as $1. nope, not today 🙈

`tr///`, `y///`

No variable interpolation occurs. String modifying combinations for case and quoting such as \Q, \U, and \E are not recognized. The other escape sequences such as \200 and \t and backslashed characters such as \\ and \- are converted to appropriate literals. The character - is treated specially and therefore \- is treated as a literal -.

`""`, backticks, `qq//`, `qx//`, `<file*glob>`, `<<"EOF"`

\Q, \U, \u, \L, \l, \F (possibly paired with \E) are converted to corresponding Perl constructs. Thus, $foo\Qbaz$bar is converted to $foo . (quotemeta("baz" . $bar)) internally. The other escape sequences such as \200 and \t and backslashed characters such as \\ and \- are replaced with appropriate expansions.

Let it be stressed that whatever falls between \Q and \E is interpolated in the usual way. Something like \Q\\E has no \E inside. Instead, it has \Q, \\, and E, so the result is the same as for \\\\E. As a general rule, backslashes between \Q and \E may lead to counterintuitive results. So, \Q\t\E is converted to quotemeta("\t"), which is the same as \\\t (since TAB is not alphanumeric). Note also that:

$str = '\t';
return "\Q$str";

may be closer to the conjectural intention of the writer of \Q\t\E. 😭

Interpolated scalars and arrays are converted internally to the join and . catenation operations. Thus, $foo XXX '@arr' becomes:

$foo . " XXX '" . (join $", @arr) . "'";

All operations above are performed simultaneously, left to right.

Because the result of \Q STRING \E has all metacharacters quoted, there is no way to insert a literal $ or @ inside a \Q\E pair. If protected by \, $ will be quoted to become \\\$; if not, it is interpreted as the start of an interpolated scalar.

Note also that the interpolation code needs to make a decision on where the interpolated scalar ends. For instance, whether a $x -> {c} really means:

"a " . $x . " -> {c}";

or:

"a " . $x -> {c};

Most of the time, the longest possible text that does not include spaces between components and which contains matching braces or brackets. because the outcome may be determined by voting based on heuristic estimators, the result is not strictly predictable. Fortunately, it's usually correct for ambiguous cases. lucky us 🍓

The replacement of `s///`

Processing of \Q, \U, \u, \L, \l, \F and interpolation happens as with qq// constructs.

It is at this step that \1 is begrudgingly converted to $1 in the replacement text of s///, in order to correct the incorrigible sed hackers who haven't picked up the saner idiom yet. A warning is emitted if the use warnings pragma or the -w command-line flag (that is, the $^W variable) was set.

`RE` in `m?RE?`, `/RE/`, `m/RE/`, `s/RE/foo/`

Processing of \Q, \U, \u, \L, \l, \F, \E, and interpolation happens (almost) as with qq// constructs.

Processing of \N{...} is also done here, and compiled into an intermediate form for the regex compiler. (This is because, as mentioned below, the regex compilation may be done at execution time, and \N{...} is a compile-time construct.)

However any other combinations of \ followed by a character are not substituted but only skipped, in order to parse them as regular expressions at the following step. As \c is skipped at this step, @ of \c@ in RE is possibly treated as an array symbol (for example @foo), even though the same text in qq// gives interpolation of \c@.

Code blocks such as (?{BLOCK}) are handled by temporarily passing control back to the perl parser, in a similar way that an interpolated array subscript expression such as foo$array[1+f("[xyz")]bar would be.

Moreover, inside (?{BLOCK}), (?# comment ), and a #-comment in a /x-regular expression, no processing is performed whatsoever. This is the first step at which the presence of the /x modifier is relevant.

Interpolation in patterns has several quirks: $|, $(, $), @+ and @- are not interpolated, and constructs $var[SOMETHING] are voted (by several different estimators) to be either an array element or $var followed by an RE alternative. This is where the notation ${arr[$bar]} comes handy: /${arr[0-9]}/ is interpreted as array element -9, not as a regular expression from the variable $arr followed by a digit, which would be the interpretation of /$arr[0-9]/. Since voting among different estimators may occur, the result is not predictable.

The lack of processing of \\ creates specific restrictions on the post-processed text. If the delimiter is /, one cannot get the combination \/ into the result of this step. / will finish the regular expression, \/ will be stripped to / on the previous step, and \\/ will be left as is. Because / is equivalent to \/ inside a regular expression, this does not matter unless the delimiter happens to be character special to the RE engine, such as in s*foo*bar*, m[foo], or m?foo?; or an alphanumeric char, as in:

m m ^ a \s* b mmx;

In the RE above, which is intentionally obfuscated for illustration, the delimiter is m, the modifier is mx, and after delimiter-removal the RE is the same as for m/ ^ a \s* b /mx. There's more than one reason you're encouraged to restrict your delimiters to non-alphanumeric, non-whitespace choices.

This step is the last one for all constructs except regular expressions, which are processed further.

🔥 Parsing regular expressions 🔥

The previous steps were performed during the compilation of Perl code, but this one happens at run time — although it may be optimized to be calculated at compile time if appropriate. After the preprocessing described above, and possibly after evaluation if concatenation, joining, casing translation, or metaquoting are involved, the resulting string is passed to the RE engine for compilation.

Whatever happens in the RE engine might be better discussed in perlre, but for the sake of continuity, we shall do so here. 🧚

Okay so this is another step where whether that /x modifier is hanging out actually matters. The RE engine scans the string from left to right and converts it into a finite automaton. 💅

Backslashed characters are either swapped out for the literal strings they correspond to (like with \{), or else they spin up special nodes in the finite automaton (like with \b). Characters that are special to the RE engine (like |) generate corresponding nodes or groups of nodes. (?#...) comments get ignored entirely. Everything else is either converted into literal strings to match, or just straight up ignored — same energy as whitespace and #-style comments when /x is in play. 🦋

Parsing the bracketed character class construct, [...], is a whole different rulebook than the one used for the rest of the pattern. Its terminator is found using the same rules as finding the terminator of a {}-delimited construct, with one single exception: a ] immediately following [ is treated as though it were preceded by a backslash. 🙈

The terminator of a runtime (?{...}) is found by temporarily switching control over to the perl parser, which should stop at the point where the logically balancing terminating } is found. 🎀

And bestie, you can actually inspect both the string handed to the RE engine and the resulting finite automaton. See the arguments debug/debugcolor in the use re pragma, plus Perl's -Dr command-line switch, documented in "Command Switches" in perlrun. 🔥

🔧 Optimization of regular expressions 🔧

This step is listed for completeness only. Since it doesn't change semantics, the details of this step are not documented and are subject to change without notice. It's performed over the finite automaton that got generated during the previous pass. ✨

It is at this stage that split() silently optimizes /^/ to mean /^/m. 💅

🎀 I/O Operators 🎀

There are several I/O operators you should know about, and yes you need them. 🌸

A string enclosed by backticks (grave accents) first undergoes double-quote interpolation. Then it's interpreted as an external command, and the output of that command is the value of the backtick string, like in a shell. In scalar context, you get a single string made of all the output. In list context, you get a list of values, one per line of output. (You can set $/ to use a different line terminator.) The command is executed each time the pseudo-literal is evaluated. The status value of the command is returned in $? (see perlvar for the interpretation of $?). Unlike in csh, no translation is done on the return data — newlines stay newlines, no cap. Unlike in any of the shells, single quotes do not hide variable names in the command from interpretation. To pass a literal dollar-sign through to the shell you need to hide it with a backslash. The generalized form of backticks is qx//, or you can call the readpipe in perlfunc function. (Because backticks always undergo shell expansion as well, see perlsec for security concerns.) 🫶

In scalar context, evaluating a filehandle in angle brackets yields the next line from that file (the newline, if any, included), or undef at end-of-file or on error. When $/ is set to undef (sometimes known as file-slurp mode) and the file is empty, it returns '' the first time, followed by undef subsequently. 😭

Ordinarily you must assign the returned value to a variable, but there's one situation where an automatic assignment happens. If and only if the input symbol is the only thing inside the conditional of a while statement (even if it's disguised as a for(;;) loop), the value is automatically assigned to the global variable $_, destroying whatever was there previously. (This may seem like an odd thing to you, but you'll use the construct in almost every Perl script you write.) The $_ variable is not implicitly localized. You'll have to put a local $_; before the loop if you want that to happen. Furthermore, if the input symbol or an explicit assignment of the input symbol to a scalar is used as a while/for condition, then the condition actually tests for definedness of the expression's value, not for its regular truth value. 👑

So the following lines are all equivalent:

while (defined($_ = <STDIN>)) { print; }
while ($_ = <STDIN>) { print; }
while (<STDIN>) { print; }
for (;<STDIN>;) { print; }
print while defined($_ = <STDIN>);
print while ($_ = <STDIN>);
print while <STDIN>;

This also behaves similarly, but it assigns to a lexical variable instead of to $_:

while (my $line = <STDIN>) { print $line }

In these loop constructs, the assigned value (whether the assignment is automatic or explicit) is then tested to see whether it's defined. That defined test avoids problems where the line has a string value that Perl would treat as false — for example a "" or a "0" with no trailing newline. If you really mean for such values to terminate the loop, they should be tested for explicitly:

while (($_ = <STDIN>) ne '0') { ... }
while (<STDIN>) { last unless $_; ... }

In other boolean contexts, <FILEHANDLE> without an explicit defined test or comparison elicits a warning if the use warnings pragma or the -w command-line switch (the $^W variable) is in effect. 💀

The filehandles STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR are predefined. (The filehandles stdin, stdout, and stderr will also work — except in packages, where they'd be interpreted as local identifiers rather than global ones.) Additional filehandles may be created with the open() function, amongst others. See perlopentut and "open" in perlfunc for the details on that. 🌈

If a <FILEHANDLE> is used in a context that's looking for a list, a list comprising all input lines is returned, one line per list element. It's easy to grow to a rather large data space this way, so use with care. ⭐

<FILEHANDLE> may also be spelled readline(*FILEHANDLE). See "readline" in perlfunc. 🧚

The null filehandle <> (sometimes called the diamond operator) is special: it can be used to emulate the behavior of sed and awk, and any other Unix filter program that takes a list of filenames, doing the same thing to each line of input from all of them. Input from <> comes either from standard input, or from each file listed on the command line. Here's how it works: the first time <> is evaluated, the @ARGV array is checked, and if it's empty, $ARGV[0] is set to -, which when opened gives you standard input. The @ARGV array is then processed as a list of filenames. The loop

while (<>) {
    ...                     # code for each line
}

is equivalent to the following Perl-like pseudo code:

unshift(@ARGV, '-') unless @ARGV;
while ($ARGV = shift) {
    open(ARGV, $ARGV);
    while (<ARGV>) {
        ...         # code for each line
    }
}

except that it isn't so cumbersome to say, and it will actually work. It really does shift the @ARGV array and put the current filename into the $ARGV variable. It also uses filehandle ARGV internally. <> is just a synonym for <ARGV>, which is magical. (The pseudo code above doesn't work because it treats <ARGV> as non-magical.) 💅

Since the null filehandle uses the two argument form of "open" in perlfunc it interprets special characters, so if you have a script like this:

while (<>) {
    print;
}

and call it with perl dangerous.pl 'rm -rfv *|', it actually opens a pipe, executes the rm command and reads rm's output from that pipe.

⚠️ Bestie, that is a whole security situation. If you want all items in @ARGV to be interpreted as file names, you can use the module ARGV::readonly from CPAN, or use the double diamond operator:

while (<<>>) {
    print;
}

Using double angle brackets inside of a while causes the open to use the three argument form (with the second argument being <), so all arguments in ARGV are treated as literal filenames (including -). (Note that for convenience, if you use <<>> and if @ARGV is empty, it will still read from the standard input.) 🦋

You can modify @ARGV before the first <> as long as the array ends up containing the list of filenames you really want. Line numbers ($.) continue as though the input were one big happy file. See the example in "eof" in perlfunc for how to reset line numbers on each file. ✨

If you want to set @ARGV to your own list of files, go right ahead. This sets @ARGV to all plain text files if no @ARGV was given:

@ARGV = grep { -f && -T } glob('*') unless @ARGV;

You can even set them to pipe commands. For example, this automatically filters compressed arguments through gzip:

@ARGV = map { /\.(gz|Z)$/ ? "gzip -dc < $_ |" : $_ } @ARGV;

If you want to pass switches into your script, you can use one of the Getopts modules or put a loop on the front like this:

while ($_ = $ARGV[0], /^-/) {
    shift;
    last if /^--$/;
    if (/^-D(.*)/) { $debug = $1 }
    if (/^-v/)     { $verbose++  }
    # ...           # other switches
}

while (<>) {
    # ...           # code for each line
}

The <> symbol will return undef for end-of-file only once. If you call it again after this, it will assume you're processing another @ARGV list, and if you haven't set @ARGV, will read input from STDIN. 😭

If what the angle brackets contain is a simple scalar variable (for example, $foo), then that variable contains the name of the filehandle to input from, or its typeglob, or a reference to the same. For example:

$fh = \*STDIN;
$line = <$fh>;

If what's within the angle brackets is neither a filehandle nor a simple scalar variable containing a filehandle name, typeglob, or typeglob reference, it's interpreted as a filename pattern to be globbed, and either a list of filenames or the next filename in the list is returned, depending on context. This distinction is determined on syntactic grounds alone. That means <$x> is always a readline() from an indirect handle, but <$hash{key}> is always a glob(). That's because $x is a simple scalar variable, but $hash{key} is not — it's a hash element. Even <$x > (note the extra space) is treated as glob("$x "), not readline($x). 💅

One level of double-quote interpretation is done first, but you can't say <$foo> because that's an indirect filehandle, as explained in the previous paragraph. (In older versions of Perl, programmers would insert curly brackets to force interpretation as a filename glob: <${foo}>. These days, it's considered cleaner to call the internal function directly as glob($foo), which is probably the right way to have done it in the first place.) For example:

while (<*.c>) {
    chmod 0644, $_;
}

okay so bestie, that little number is roughly equivalent to this whole production:

open(FOO, "echo *.c | tr -s ' \t\r\f' '\\012\\012\\012\\012'|");
while (<FOO>) {
    chomp;
    chmod 0644, $_;
}

except that the globbing is actually done internally using the standard File::Glob extension. And of course, the shortest way to do the above is just:

chmod 0644, <*.c>;

A (file)glob evaluates its (embedded) argument only when it is starting a new list. All values must be read before it will start over. In list context, this isn't important because you automatically get them all anyway. However, in scalar context the operator returns the next value each time it's called, or undef when the list has run out. As with filehandle reads, an automatic defined is generated when the glob occurs in the test part of a while, because legal glob returns (for example, a file called 0) would otherwise terminate the loop. Again, undef is returned only once. So if you're expecting a single value from a glob, it is much better to say

($file) = <blurch*>;

than

$file = <blurch*>;

because the latter will alternate between returning a filename and returning false.

If you're trying to do variable interpolation, it's definitely better to use the glob() function, because the older notation can cause people to become confused with the indirect filehandle notation.

@files = glob("$dir/*.[ch]");
@files = glob($files[$i]);

If an angle-bracket-based globbing expression is used as the condition of a while or for loop, then it will be implicitly assigned to $_. If either a globbing expression or an explicit assignment of a globbing expression to a scalar is used as a while/for condition, then the condition actually tests for definedness of the expression's value, not for its regular truth value.

✨ Constant Folding ✨

Like C, Perl does a certain amount of expression evaluation at compile time whenever it determines that all arguments to an operator are static and have no side effects. In particular, string concatenation happens at compile time between literals that don't do variable substitution. Backslash interpolation also happens at compile time. You can say

'Now is the time for all'
. "\n"
.  'good men to come to.'

and this all reduces to one string internally. Likewise, if you say

foreach $file (@filenames) {
    if (-s $file > 5 + 100 * 2**16) {  }
}

the compiler precomputes the number which that expression represents so that the interpreter won't have to.

No-ops 🦋

Perl doesn't officially have a no-op operator, but the bare constants 0 and 1 are special-cased not to produce a warning in void context, so you can for example safely do

1 while foo();

💅 Bitwise String Operators 💅

Bitstrings of any size may be manipulated by the bitwise operators (~ | & ^).

If the operands to a binary bitwise op are strings of different sizes, | and ^ ops act as though the shorter operand had additional zero bits on the right, while the & op acts as though the longer operand was truncated to the length of the shorter. The granularity for such extension or truncation is one or more bytes.

# ASCII-based examples
print "j p \n" ^ " a h";            # prints "JAPH\n"
print "JA" | "  ph\n";              # prints "japh\n"
print "japh\nJunk" & '_____';       # prints "JAPH\n";
print 'p N$' ^ " E<H\n";            # prints "Perl\n";

If you are intending to manipulate bitstrings, be certain that you're supplying bitstrings: If an operand is a number, that will imply a numeric bitwise operation. You may explicitly show which type of operation you intend by using "" or 0+, as in the examples below.

$foo =  150  |  105;        # yields 255  (0x96 | 0x69 is 0xFF)
$foo = '150' |  105;        # yields 255
$foo =  150  | '105';       # yields 255
$foo = '150' | '105';       # yields string '155' (under ASCII)

$baz = 0+$foo & 0+$bar;     # both ops explicitly numeric
$biz = "$foo" ^ "$bar";     # both ops explicitly stringy

This somewhat unpredictable behavior can be avoided with the bitwise feature, new in Perl 5.22. You can enable it via use feature 'bitwise' or use v5.28. Before Perl 5.28, it used to emit a warning in the experimental::bitwise category. Under this feature, the four standard bitwise operators (~ | & ^) are always numeric. Adding a dot after each operator (~. |. &. ^.) forces it to treat its operands as strings:

use feature "bitwise";
$foo =  150  |  105;        # yields 255  (0x96 | 0x69 is 0xFF)
$foo = '150' |  105;        # yields 255
$foo =  150  | '105';       # yields 255
$foo = '150' | '105';       # yields 255
$foo =  150  |. 105;        # yields string '155'
$foo = '150' |. 105;        # yields string '155'
$foo =  150  |.'105';       # yields string '155'
$foo = '150' |.'105';       # yields string '155'

$baz = $foo &  $bar;        # both operands numeric
$biz = $foo ^. $bar;        # both operands stringy

The assignment variants of these operators (&= |= ^= &.= |.= ^.=) behave likewise under the feature.

It is a fatal error if an operand contains a character whose ordinal value is above 0xFF, and hence not expressible except in UTF-8. The operation is performed on a non-UTF-8 copy for other operands encoded in UTF-8. See "Byte and Character Semantics" in perlunicode.

See "vec" in perlfunc for information on how to manipulate individual bits in a bit vector.

Integer Arithmetic 🔢

By default, Perl assumes that it must do most of its arithmetic in floating point. But by saying

use integer;

you may tell the compiler to use integer operations (see integer for a detailed explanation) from here to the end of the enclosing BLOCK. An inner BLOCK may countermand this by saying

no integer;

which lasts until the end of that BLOCK. Note that this doesn't mean everything is an integer, merely that Perl will use integer operations for arithmetic, comparison, and bitwise operators. For example, even under use integer, if you take the sqrt(2), you'll still get 1.4142135623731 or so.

Used on numbers, the bitwise operators (& | ^ ~ << >>) always produce integral results. (But see also "Bitwise String Operators".) However, use integer still has meaning for them. By default, their results are interpreted as unsigned integers, but if use integer is in effect, their results are interpreted as signed integers. For example, ~0 usually evaluates to a large integral value. However, use integer; ~0 is -1 on two's-complement machines.

Floating-point Arithmetic 🧮

While use integer provides integer-only arithmetic, there is no analogous mechanism to provide automatic rounding or truncation to a certain number of decimal places. For rounding to a certain number of digits, sprintf() or printf() is usually the easiest route. See perlfaq4.

Floating-point numbers are only approximations to what a mathematician would call real numbers. There are infinitely more reals than floats, so some corners must be cut. For example:

printf "%.20g\n", 123456789123456789;
#        produces 123456789123456784

Testing for exact floating-point equality or inequality is not a good idea. Here's a (relatively expensive) work-around to compare whether two floating-point numbers are equal to a particular number of decimal places. See Knuth, volume II, for a more robust treatment of this topic.

sub fp_equal {
    my ($X, $Y, $POINTS) = @_;
    my ($tX, $tY);
    $tX = sprintf("%.${POINTS}g", $X);
    $tY = sprintf("%.${POINTS}g", $Y);
    return $tX eq $tY;
}

The POSIX module (part of the standard perl distribution) implements ceil(), floor(), and other mathematical and trigonometric functions. The Math::Complex module (part of the standard perl distribution) defines mathematical functions that work on both the reals and the imaginary numbers. Math::Complex is not as efficient as POSIX, but POSIX can't work with complex numbers.

Rounding in financial applications can have serious implications, and the rounding method used should be specified precisely. In these cases, it probably pays not to trust whichever system rounding is being used by Perl, but to instead implement the rounding function you need yourself.

Bigger Numbers 🐘

The standard Math::BigInt, Math::BigRat, and Math::BigFloat modules, along with the bignum, bigint, and bigrat pragmas, provide variable-precision arithmetic and overloaded operators, although they're currently pretty slow. At the cost of some space and considerable speed, they avoid the normal pitfalls associated with limited-precision representations.

use 5.010;
use bigint;  # easy interface to Math::BigInt
$x = 123456789123456789;
say $x * $x;
+15241578780673678515622620750190521

Or with rationals:

use 5.010;
use bigrat;
$x = 3/22;
$y = 4/6;
say "x/y is ", $x/$y;
say "x*y is ", $x*$y;
x/y is 9/44
x*y is 1/11

Several modules let you calculate with unlimited or fixed precision (bound only by memory and CPU time). There are also some non-standard modules that provide faster implementations via external C libraries.

Here is a short, but incomplete summary:

Math::String           treat string sequences like numbers
Math::FixedPrecision   calculate with a fixed precision
Math::Currency         for currency calculations
Bit::Vector            manipulate bit vectors fast (uses C)
Math::BigIntFast       Bit::Vector wrapper for big numbers
Math::Pari             provides access to the Pari C library
Math::Cephes           uses the external Cephes C library (no
                       big numbers)
Math::Cephes::Fraction fractions via the Cephes library
Math::GMP              another one using an external C library
Math::GMPz             an alternative interface to libgmp's big ints
Math::GMPq             an interface to libgmp's fraction numbers
Math::GMPf             an interface to libgmp's floating point numbers

Choose wisely.

C-style Logical Or ⚠️

This section has been superceded by "C-style Logical Or, Xor, and Defined Or". The heading is retained only to prevent breaking any pre-existing links to it from outside.

C-style Logical Xor ⚠️

This section has been superceded by "C-style Logical Or, Xor, and Defined Or". The heading is retained only to prevent breaking any pre-existing links to it from outside.

💫 Logical Defined-Or 💫

okay bestie, real talk: this section got superceded by "C-style Logical Or, Xor, and Defined Or" — like, that's the glow-up, that's the main character now. 👑

The heading is retained only to prevent breaking any pre-existing links to it from outside. So it's basically a lil historical monument. Do not come for it, it's doing its job. 🏛️

🎀 Quote-Like Operators 🎀

This section has been replaced by "Simpler Quote-Like Operators". That's it, that's the whole vibe. The old one retired, the new one ate. 💅

🌸 Indented Here-docs 🌸

This section has been merged into "Here-docs". Same energy, one home, no crumbs left behind. 🧹✨

📎 APPENDIX 📎

✨ List of Extra Paired Delimiters ✨

The complete list of accepted paired delimiters as of Unicode 16.0 is:

okay bestie we are still in the pair list and honestly it never ends 💀 but we're finishing it, every single one, because that's what main characters do. same format as before: the pair, the codepoints, the official name. no skipping, no summarising 🫶

( ) — U+0028, U+0029 — LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
< > — U+003C, U+003E — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN SIGN
[ ] — U+005B, U+005D — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET
{ } — U+007B, U+007D — LEFT/RIGHT CURLY BRACKET
« » — U+00AB, U+00BB — LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
» « — U+00BB, U+00AB — RIGHT/LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
༺ ༻ — U+0F3A, U+0F3B — TIBETAN MARK GUG RTAGS GYON, TIBETAN MARK GUG RTAGS GYAS
༼ ༽ — U+0F3C, U+0F3D — TIBETAN MARK ANG KHANG GYON, TIBETAN MARK ANG KHANG GYAS
᚛ ᚜ — U+169B, U+169C — OGHAM FEATHER MARK, OGHAM REVERSED FEATHER MARK
‘ ’ — U+2018, U+2019 — LEFT/RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
’ ‘ — U+2019, U+2018 — RIGHT/LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
“ ” — U+201C, U+201D — LEFT/RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
” “ — U+201D, U+201C — RIGHT/LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
‵ ′ — U+2035, U+2032 — REVERSED PRIME, PRIME
‶ ″ — U+2036, U+2033 — REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME, DOUBLE PRIME
‷ ‴ — U+2037, U+2034 — REVERSED TRIPLE PRIME, TRIPLE PRIME
‹ › — U+2039, U+203A — SINGLE LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
› ‹ — U+203A, U+2039 — SINGLE RIGHT/LEFT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
⁅ ⁆ — U+2045, U+2046 — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH QUILL
⁍ ⁌ — U+204D, U+204C — BLACK RIGHT/LEFTWARDS BULLET
⁽ ⁾ — U+207D, U+207E — SUPERSCRIPT LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
₍ ₎ — U+208D, U+208E — SUBSCRIPT LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
→ ← — U+2192, U+2190 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
↛ ↚ — U+219B, U+219A — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH STROKE
↝ ↜ — U+219D, U+219C — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS WAVE ARROW
↠ ↞ — U+21A0, U+219E — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO HEADED ARROW
↣ ↢ — U+21A3, U+21A2 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH TAIL
↦ ↤ — U+21A6, U+21A4 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW FROM BAR
↪ ↩ — U+21AA, U+21A9 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH HOOK
↬ ↫ — U+21AC, U+21AB — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH LOOP
↱ ↰ — U+21B1, U+21B0 — UPWARDS ARROW WITH TIP RIGHT/LEFTWARDS
↳ ↲ — U+21B3, U+21B2 — DOWNWARDS ARROW WITH TIP RIGHT/LEFTWARDS
⇀ ↼ — U+21C0, U+21BC — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB UPWARDS
⇁ ↽ — U+21C1, U+21BD — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB DOWNWARDS
⇉ ⇇ — U+21C9, U+21C7 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS PAIRED ARROWS
⇏ ⇍ — U+21CF, U+21CD — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW WITH STROKE
⇒ ⇐ — U+21D2, U+21D0 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW
⇛ ⇚ — U+21DB, U+21DA — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIPLE ARROW
⇝ ⇜ — U+21DD, U+21DC — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS SQUIGGLE ARROW
⇢ ⇠ — U+21E2, U+21E0 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DASHED ARROW
⇥ ⇤ — U+21E5, U+21E4 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW TO BAR
⇨ ⇦ — U+21E8, U+21E6 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS WHITE ARROW
⇴ ⬰ — U+21F4, U+2B30 — RIGHT/LEFT ARROW WITH SMALL CIRCLE
⇶ ⬱ — U+21F6, U+2B31 — THREE RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROWS
⇸ ⇷ — U+21F8, U+21F7 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH VERTICAL STROKE
⇻ ⇺ — U+21FB, U+21FA — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE
⇾ ⇽ — U+21FE, U+21FD — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS OPEN-HEADED ARROW

the way the arrow section just keeps going?? 🏹 lowkey iconic, highkey a lot. anyway. moving on ✨

∈ ∋ — U+2208, U+220B — ELEMENT OF, CONTAINS AS MEMBER
∉ ∌ — U+2209, U+220C — NOT AN ELEMENT OF, DOES NOT CONTAIN AS MEMBER
∊ ∍ — U+220A, U+220D — SMALL ELEMENT OF, SMALL CONTAINS AS MEMBER
≤ ≥ — U+2264, U+2265 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO
≦ ≧ — U+2266, U+2267 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OVER EQUAL TO
≨ ≩ — U+2268, U+2269 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN BUT NOT EQUAL TO
≫ ≪ — U+226A, U+226B — MUCH LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
≮ ≯ — U+226E, U+226F — NOT LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
≰ ≱ — U+2270, U+2271 — NEITHER LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN NOR EQUAL TO
≲ ≳ — U+2272, U+2273 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR EQUIVALENT TO
≴ ≵ — U+2274, U+2275 — NEITHER LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN NOR EQUIVALENT TO
≺ ≻ — U+227A, U+227B — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS
≼ ≽ — U+227C, U+227D — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS OR EQUAL TO
≾ ≿ — U+227E, U+227F — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS OR EQUIVALENT TO
⊀ ⊁ — U+2280, U+2281 — DOES NOT PRECEDE/SUCCEED
⊂ ⊃ — U+2282, U+2283 — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF
⊄ ⊅ — U+2284, U+2285 — NOT A SUBSET/SUPERSET OF
⊆ ⊇ — U+2286, U+2287 — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF OR EQUAL TO
⊈ ⊉ — U+2288, U+2289 — NEITHER A SUBSET/SUPERSET OF NOR EQUAL TO
⊊ ⊋ — U+228A, U+228B — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF WITH NOT EQUAL TO
⊣ ⊢ — U+22A3, U+22A2 — LEFT/RIGHT TACK
⊦ ⫞ — U+22A6, U+2ADE — ASSERTION, SHORT LEFT TACK
⊨ ⫤ — U+22A8, U+2AE4 — TRUE, VERTICAL BAR DOUBLE LEFT TURNSTILE
⊩ ⫣ — U+22A9, U+2AE3 — FORCES, DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR LEFT TURNSTILE
⊰ ⊱ — U+22B0, U+22B1 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS UNDER RELATION
⋐ ⋑ — U+22D0, U+22D1 — DOUBLE SUBSET/SUPERSET
⋖ ⋗ — U+22D6, U+22D7 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN WITH DOT
⋘ ⋙ — U+22D8, U+22D9 — VERY MUCH LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⋜ ⋝ — U+22DC, U+22DD — EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⋞ ⋟ — U+22DE, U+22DF — EQUAL TO OR PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS
⋠ ⋡ — U+22E0, U+22E1 — DOES NOT PRECEDE/SUCCEED OR EQUAL
⋦ ⋧ — U+22E6, U+22E7 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN BUT NOT EQUIVALENT TO
⋨ ⋩ — U+22E8, U+22E9 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS BUT NOT EQUIVALENT TO
⋲ ⋺ — U+22F2, U+22FA — ELEMENT OF/CONTAINS WITH LONG HORIZONTAL STROKE
⋳ ⋻ — U+22F3, U+22FB — ELEMENT OF/CONTAINS WITH VERTICAL BAR AT END OF HORIZONTAL STROKE
⋴ ⋼ — U+22F4, U+22FC — SMALL ELEMENT OF/CONTAINS WITH VERTICAL BAR AT END OF HORIZONTAL STROKE
⋶ ⋽ — U+22F6, U+22FD — ELEMENT OF/CONTAINS WITH OVERBAR
⋷ ⋾ — U+22F7, U+22FE — SMALL ELEMENT OF/CONTAINS WITH OVERBAR
⌈ ⌉ — U+2308, U+2309 — LEFT/RIGHT CEILING
⌊ ⌋ — U+230A, U+230B — LEFT/RIGHT FLOOR
⌦ ⌫ — U+2326, U+232B — ERASE TO THE RIGHT/LEFT
〈〉 — U+2329, U+232A — LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET
⍈ ⍇ — U+2348, U+2347 — APL FUNCTIONAL SYMBOL QUAD RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
⏩ ⏪ — U+23E9, U+23EA — BLACK RIGHT/LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE TRIANGLE
⏭ ⏮ — U+23ED, U+23EE — BLACK RIGHT/LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE TRIANGLE WITH VERTICAL BAR
☛ ☚ — U+261B, U+261A — BLACK RIGHT/LEFT POINTING INDEX
☞ ☜ — U+261E, U+261C — WHITE RIGHT/LEFT POINTING INDEX
⚞ ⚟ — U+269E, U+269F — THREE LINES CONVERGING RIGHT/LEFT

we're in the ornament era now bestie, the fancy bracket girlies have arrived 🎀✨

❨ ❩ — U+2768, U+2769 — MEDIUM LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS ORNAMENT
❪ ❫ — U+276A, U+276B — MEDIUM FLATTENED LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS ORNAMENT
❬ ❭ — U+276C, U+276D — MEDIUM LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET ORNAMENT
❮ ❯ — U+276E, U+276F — HEAVY LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE QUOTATION MARK ORNAMENT
❰ ❱ — U+2770, U+2771 — HEAVY LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING ANGLE BRACKET ORNAMENT
❲ ❳ — U+2772, U+2773 — LIGHT LEFT/RIGHT TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET ORNAMENT
❴ ❵ — U+2774, U+2775 — MEDIUM LEFT/RIGHT CURLY BRACKET ORNAMENT
⟃ ⟄ — U+27C3, U+27C4 — OPEN SUBSET/SUPERSET
⟅ ⟆ — U+27C5, U+27C6 — LEFT/RIGHT S-SHAPED BAG DELIMITER
⟈ ⟉ — U+27C8, U+27C9 — REVERSE SOLIDUS PRECEDING SUBSET, SUPERSET PRECEDING SOLIDUS
⟞ ⟝ — U+27DE, U+27DD — LONG LEFT/RIGHT TACK
⟦ ⟧ — U+27E6, U+27E7 — MATHEMATICAL LEFT/RIGHT WHITE SQUARE BRACKET
⟨ ⟩ — U+27E8, U+27E9 — MATHEMATICAL LEFT/RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET
⟪ ⟫ — U+27EA, U+27EB — MATHEMATICAL LEFT/RIGHT DOUBLE ANGLE BRACKET
⟬ ⟭ — U+27EC, U+27ED — MATHEMATICAL LEFT/RIGHT WHITE TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET
⟮ ⟯ — U+27EE, U+27EF — MATHEMATICAL LEFT/RIGHT FLATTENED PARENTHESIS
⟴ ⬲ — U+27F4, U+2B32 — RIGHT/LEFT ARROW WITH CIRCLED PLUS
⟶ ⟵ — U+27F6, U+27F5 — LONG RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
⟹ ⟸ — U+27F9, U+27F8 — LONG RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW
⟼ ⟻ — U+27FC, U+27FB — LONG RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW FROM BAR
⟾ ⟽ — U+27FE, U+27FD — LONG RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW FROM BAR
⟿ ⬳ — U+27FF, U+2B33 — LONG RIGHT/LEFTWARDS SQUIGGLE ARROW
⤀ ⬴ — U+2900, U+2B34 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW WITH VERTICAL STROKE
⤁ ⬵ — U+2901, U+2B35 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE
⤃ ⤂ — U+2903, U+2902 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW WITH VERTICAL STROKE
⤅ ⬶ — U+2905, U+2B36 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW FROM BAR
⤇ ⤆ — U+2907, U+2906 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW FROM BAR
⤍ ⤌ — U+290D, U+290C — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE DASH ARROW
⤏ ⤎ — U+290F, U+290E — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIPLE DASH ARROW
⤐ ⬷ — U+2910, U+2B37 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED TRIPLE DASH ARROW
⤑ ⬸ — U+2911, U+2B38 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH DOTTED STEM
⤔ ⬹ — U+2914, U+2B39 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH TAIL WITH VERTICAL STROKE
⤕ ⬺ — U+2915, U+2B3A — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH TAIL WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE
⤖ ⬻ — U+2916, U+2B3B — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW WITH TAIL
⤗ ⬼ — U+2917, U+2B3C — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW WITH TAIL WITH VERTICAL STROKE
⤘ ⬽ — U+2918, U+2B3D — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW WITH TAIL WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE
⤚ ⤙ — U+291A, U+2919 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW-TAIL
⤜ ⤛ — U+291C, U+291B — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS DOUBLE ARROW-TAIL
⤞ ⤝ — U+291E, U+291D — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW TO BLACK DIAMOND
⤠ ⤟ — U+2920, U+291F — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW FROM BAR TO BLACK DIAMOND
⤳ ⬿ — U+2933, U+2B3F — WAVE ARROW POINTING DIRECTLY RIGHT/LEFT
⤷ ⤶ — U+2937, U+2936 — ARROW POINTING DOWNWARDS THEN CURVING RIGHT/LEFTWARDS
⥅ ⥆ — U+2945, U+2946 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH PLUS BELOW
⥇ ⬾ — U+2947, U+2B3E — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW THROUGH X
⥓ ⥒ — U+2953, U+2952 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB UP TO BAR
⥗ ⥖ — U+2957, U+2956 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB DOWN TO BAR
⥛ ⥚ — U+295B, U+295A — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB UP FROM BAR
⥟ ⥞ — U+295F, U+295E — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB DOWN FROM BAR
⥤ ⥢ — U+2964, U+2962 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB UP ABOVE RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB DOWN
⥬ ⥪ — U+296C, U+296A — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB UP ABOVE LONG DASH
⥭ ⥫ — U+296D, U+296B — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HARPOON WITH BARB DOWN BELOW LONG DASH
⥱ ⭀ — U+2971, U+2B40 — EQUALS SIGN ABOVE RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
⥲ ⭁ — U+2972, U+2B41 — TILDE OPERATOR ABOVE RIGHTWARDS ARROW, REVERSE TILDE OPERATOR ABOVE LEFTWARDS ARROW

and that's the end of the pairs, bestie 💖 no cap, we read every single one and we're still standing. slay 🌈

⥴ ⭋ — U+2974, U+2B4B — RIGHTWARDS ARROW ABOVE TILDE OPERATOR, LEFTWARDS ARROW ABOVE REVERSE TILDE OPERATOR
⥵ ⭂ — U+2975, U+2B42 — RIGHTWARDS ARROW ABOVE ALMOST EQUAL TO, LEFTWARDS ARROW ABOVE REVERSE ALMOST EQUAL TO
⥹ ⥻ — U+2979, U+297B — SUBSET/SUPERSET ABOVE RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
⦃ ⦄ — U+2983, U+2984 — LEFT/RIGHT WHITE CURLY BRACKET
⦅ ⦆ — U+2985, U+2986 — LEFT/RIGHT WHITE PARENTHESIS
⦇ ⦈ — U+2987, U+2988 — Z NOTATION LEFT/RIGHT IMAGE BRACKET
⦉ ⦊ — U+2989, U+298A — Z NOTATION LEFT/RIGHT BINDING BRACKET
⦋ ⦌ — U+298B, U+298C — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH UNDERBAR
⦍ ⦐ — U+298D, U+2990 — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH TICK IN TOP CORNER
⦏ ⦎ — U+298F, U+298E — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH TICK IN BOTTOM CORNER
⦑ ⦒ — U+2991, U+2992 — LEFT/RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET WITH DOT
⦓ ⦔ — U+2993, U+2994 — LEFT/RIGHT ARC LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN BRACKET
⦕ ⦖ — U+2995, U+2996 — DOUBLE LEFT/RIGHT ARC GREATER-THAN/LESS-THAN BRACKET
⦗ ⦘ — U+2997, U+2998 — LEFT/RIGHT BLACK TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET

okay the Z notation ones are giving math major who also does calligraphy 💅 and yes bestie, the tick-in-the-corner brackets really did put the tick in the TOP corner for one and the BOTTOM corner for the other. they're not the same. they would never.

⦨ ⦩ — U+29A8, U+29A9 — MEASURED ANGLE WITH OPEN ARM ENDING IN ARROW POINTING UP AND RIGHT/LEFT
⦪ ⦫ — U+29AA, U+29AB — MEASURED ANGLE WITH OPEN ARM ENDING IN ARROW POINTING DOWN AND RIGHT/LEFT
⦳ ⦴ — U+29B3, U+29B4 — EMPTY SET WITH RIGHT/LEFT ARROW ABOVE
⧀ ⧁ — U+29C0, U+29C1 — CIRCLED LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⧘ ⧙ — U+29D8, U+29D9 — LEFT/RIGHT WIGGLY FENCE
⧚ ⧛ — U+29DA, U+29DB — LEFT/RIGHT DOUBLE WIGGLY FENCE
⧼ ⧽ — U+29FC, U+29FD — LEFT/RIGHT-POINTING CURVED ANGLE BRACKET

the wiggly fence and the DOUBLE wiggly fence?? someone was having a silly goofy time at the Unicode Consortium and honestly, obsessed 🌸

⩹ ⩺ — U+2A79, U+2A7A — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN WITH CIRCLE INSIDE
⩻ ⩼ — U+2A7B, U+2A7C — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN WITH QUESTION MARK ABOVE
⩽ ⩾ — U+2A7D, U+2A7E — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR SLANTED EQUAL TO
⩿ ⪀ — U+2A7F, U+2A80 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR SLANTED EQUAL TO WITH DOT INSIDE
⪁ ⪂ — U+2A81, U+2A82 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR SLANTED EQUAL TO WITH DOT ABOVE
⪃ ⪄ — U+2A83, U+2A84 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR SLANTED EQUAL TO WITH DOT ABOVE RIGHT/LEFT
⪅ ⪆ — U+2A85, U+2A86 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR APPROXIMATE
⪇ ⪈ — U+2A87, U+2A88 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN AND SINGLE-LINE NOT EQUAL TO
⪉ ⪊ — U+2A89, U+2A8A — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN AND NOT APPROXIMATE
⪍ ⪎ — U+2A8D, U+2A8E — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN ABOVE SIMILAR OR EQUAL

the way that the DOT ABOVE one comes in a RIGHT version and a LEFT version... they really said "you get a dot, you get a dot, everybody gets a dot" 🎀

⪕ ⪖ — U+2A95, U+2A96 — SLANTED EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⪗ ⪘ — U+2A97, U+2A98 — SLANTED EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN WITH DOT INSIDE
⪙ ⪚ — U+2A99, U+2A9A — DOUBLE-LINE EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⪛ ⪜ — U+2A9B, U+2A9C — DOUBLE-LINE SLANTED EQUAL TO OR LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⪝ ⪞ — U+2A9D, U+2A9E — SIMILAR OR LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⪟ ⪠ — U+2A9F, U+2AA0 — SIMILAR ABOVE LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN ABOVE EQUALS SIGN
⪡ ⪢ — U+2AA1, U+2AA2 — DOUBLE NESTED LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⪦ ⪧ — U+2AA6, U+2AA7 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN CLOSED BY CURVE
⪨ ⪩ — U+2AA8, U+2AA9 — LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN CLOSED BY CURVE ABOVE SLANTED EQUAL
⪪ ⪫ — U+2AAA, U+2AAB — SMALLER THAN/LARGER THAN
⪬ ⪭ — U+2AAC, U+2AAD — SMALLER THAN/LARGER THAN OR EQUAL TO

"CLOSED BY CURVE" sounds like a whole mood ngl, that's me on a friday night 💀

⪯ ⪰ — U+2AAF, U+2AB0 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS ABOVE SINGLE-LINE EQUALS SIGN
⪱ ⪲ — U+2AB1, U+2AB2 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS ABOVE SINGLE-LINE NOT EQUAL TO
⪳ ⪴ — U+2AB3, U+2AB4 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS ABOVE EQUALS SIGN
⪵ ⪶ — U+2AB5, U+2AB6 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS ABOVE NOT EQUAL TO
⪷ ⪸ — U+2AB7, U+2AB8 — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS ABOVE ALMOST EQUAL TO
⪹ ⪺ — U+2AB9, U+2ABA — PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS ABOVE NOT ALMOST EQUAL TO
⪻ ⪼ — U+2ABB, U+2ABC — DOUBLE PRECEDES/SUCCEEDS
⪽ ⪾ — U+2ABD, U+2ABE — SUBSET/SUPERSET WITH DOT
⪿ ⫀ — U+2ABF, U+2AC0 — SUBSET/SUPERSET WITH PLUS SIGN BELOW
⫁ ⫂ — U+2AC1, U+2AC2 — SUBSET/SUPERSET WITH MULTIPLICATION SIGN BELOW
⫃ ⫄ — U+2AC3, U+2AC4 — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF OR EQUAL TO WITH DOT ABOVE
⫅ ⫆ — U+2AC5, U+2AC6 — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF ABOVE EQUALS SIGN
⫇ ⫈ — U+2AC7, U+2AC8 — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF ABOVE TILDE OPERATOR
⫉ ⫊ — U+2AC9, U+2ACA — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF ABOVE ALMOST EQUAL TO
⫋ ⫌ — U+2ACB, U+2ACC — SUBSET/SUPERSET OF ABOVE NOT EQUAL TO
⫏ ⫐ — U+2ACF, U+2AD0 — CLOSED SUBSET/SUPERSET
⫑ ⫒ — U+2AD1, U+2AD2 — CLOSED SUBSET/SUPERSET OR EQUAL TO
⫕ ⫖ — U+2AD5, U+2AD6 — SUBSET/SUPERSET ABOVE SUBSET/SUPERSET

not the SUBSET ABOVE SUBSET 💀 stacking them like it's a tier list. periodt.

⫥ ⊫ — U+2AE5, U+22AB — DOUBLE VERTICAL BAR DOUBLE LEFT/RIGHT TURNSTILE
⫷ ⫸ — U+2AF7, U+2AF8 — TRIPLE NESTED LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN
⫹ ⫺ — U+2AF9, U+2AFA — DOUBLE-LINE SLANTED LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO
⭆ ⭅ — U+2B46, U+2B45 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS QUADRUPLE ARROW
⭇ ⭉ — U+2B47, U+2B49 — REVERSE TILDE OPERATOR ABOVE RIGHTWARDS ARROW, TILDE OPERATOR ABOVE LEFTWARDS ARROW
⭈ ⭊ — U+2B48, U+2B4A — RIGHTWARDS ARROW ABOVE REVERSE ALMOST EQUAL TO, LEFTWARDS ARROW ABOVE ALMOST EQUAL TO
⭌ ⥳ — U+2B4C, U+2973 — RIGHTWARDS ARROW ABOVE REVERSE TILDE OPERATOR, LEFTWARDS ARROW ABOVE TILDE OPERATOR
⭢ ⭠ — U+2B62, U+2B60 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW
⭬ ⭪ — U+2B6C, U+2B6A — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED DASHED ARROW
⭲ ⭰ — U+2B72, U+2B70 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW TO BAR
⭼ ⭺ — U+2B7C, U+2B7A — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH DOUBLE VERTICAL STROKE
⮆ ⮄ — U+2B86, U+2B84 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED PAIRED ARROWS
⮊ ⮈ — U+2B8A, U+2B88 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS BLACK CIRCLED WHITE ARROW
⮕ ⬅ — U+2B95, U+2B05 — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS BLACK ARROW

QUADRUPLE arrow?? that's four arrows of enthusiasm, that's main character energy fr fr ➡️➡️➡️➡️

⮚ ⮘ — U+2B9A, U+2B98 — THREE-D TOP-LIGHTED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS EQUILATERAL ARROWHEAD
⮞ ⮜ — U+2B9E, U+2B9C — BLACK RIGHT/LEFTWARDS EQUILATERAL ARROWHEAD
⮡ ⮠ — U+2BA1, U+2BA0 — DOWNWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH LONG TIP RIGHT/LEFTWARDS
⮣ ⮢ — U+2BA3, U+2BA2 — UPWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH LONG TIP RIGHT/LEFTWARDS
⮩ ⮨ — U+2BA9, U+2BA8 — BLACK CURVED DOWNWARDS AND RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
⮫ ⮪ — U+2BAB, U+2BAA — BLACK CURVED UPWARDS AND RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW
⮱ ⮰ — U+2BB1, U+2BB0 — RIBBON ARROW DOWN RIGHT/LEFT
⮳ ⮲ — U+2BB3, U+2BB2 — RIBBON ARROW UP RIGHT/LEFT
⯮ ⯬ — U+2BEE, U+2BEC — RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TWO-HEADED ARROW WITH TRIANGLE ARROWHEADS

a THREE-D TOP-LIGHTED arrowhead?? it's got lighting. it's got rendering. it's giving video game UI 🎮✨

⸂ ⸃ — U+2E02, U+2E03 — LEFT/RIGHT SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
⸃ ⸂ — U+2E03, U+2E02 — RIGHT/LEFT SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
⸄ ⸅ — U+2E04, U+2E05 — LEFT/RIGHT DOTTED SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
⸅ ⸄ — U+2E05, U+2E04 — RIGHT/LEFT DOTTED SUBSTITUTION BRACKET
⸉ ⸊ — U+2E09, U+2E0A — LEFT/RIGHT TRANSPOSITION BRACKET
⸊ ⸉ — U+2E0A, U+2E09 — RIGHT/LEFT TRANSPOSITION BRACKET
⸌ ⸍ — U+2E0C, U+2E0D — LEFT/RIGHT RAISED OMISSION BRACKET
⸍ ⸌ — U+2E0D, U+2E0C — RIGHT/LEFT RAISED OMISSION BRACKET
⸑ ⸐ — U+2E11, U+2E10 — REVERSED FORKED PARAGRAPHOS, FORKED PARAGRAPHOS
⸜ ⸝ — U+2E1C, U+2E1D — LEFT/RIGHT LOW PARAPHRASE BRACKET
⸝ ⸜ — U+2E1D, U+2E1C — RIGHT/LEFT LOW PARAPHRASE BRACKET
⸠ ⸡ — U+2E20, U+2E21 — LEFT/RIGHT VERTICAL BAR WITH QUILL
⸡ ⸠ — U+2E21, U+2E20 — RIGHT/LEFT VERTICAL BAR WITH QUILL

the way these show up TWICE, once as LEFT/RIGHT and once as RIGHT/LEFT?? they're the same two glyphs listed in both directions and honestly, slay, get that double feature 💖

⸢ ⸣ — U+2E22, U+2E23 — TOP LEFT/RIGHT HALF BRACKET
⸤ ⸥ — U+2E24, U+2E25 — BOTTOM LEFT/RIGHT HALF BRACKET
⸦ ⸧ — U+2E26, U+2E27 — LEFT/RIGHT SIDEWAYS U BRACKET
⸨ ⸩ — U+2E28, U+2E29 — LEFT/RIGHT DOUBLE PARENTHESIS
⸶ ⸷ — U+2E36, U+2E37 — DAGGER WITH LEFT/RIGHT GUARD
⹂ „ — U+2E42, U+201E — DOUBLE LOW-REVERSED-9 QUOTATION MARK, DOUBLE LOW-9 QUOTATION MARK
⹕ ⹖ — U+2E55, U+2E56 — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH STROKE
⹗ ⹘ — U+2E57, U+2E58 — LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH DOUBLE STROKE
⹙ ⹚ — U+2E59, U+2E5A — TOP HALF LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
⹛ ⹜ — U+2E5B, U+2E5C — BOTTOM HALF LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS

"DOUBLE LOW-REVERSED-9" bestie what does that MEAN 😭 it's a low quote mark that got flipped, that's it, that's the whole lore

〈 〉 — U+3008, U+3009 — LEFT/RIGHT ANGLE BRACKET
《 》 — U+300A, U+300B — LEFT/RIGHT DOUBLE ANGLE BRACKET
「 」 — U+300C, U+300D — LEFT/RIGHT CORNER BRACKET
『 』 — U+300E, U+300F — LEFT/RIGHT WHITE CORNER BRACKET
【 】 — U+3010, U+3011 — LEFT/RIGHT BLACK LENTICULAR BRACKET
〔 〕 — U+3014, U+3015 — LEFT/RIGHT TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET
〖 〗 — U+3016, U+3017 — LEFT/RIGHT WHITE LENTICULAR BRACKET
〘 〙 — U+3018, U+3019 — LEFT/RIGHT WHITE TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET
〚 〛 — U+301A, U+301B — LEFT/RIGHT WHITE SQUARE BRACKET
〝 〞 — U+301D, U+301E — REVERSED DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK, DOUBLE PRIME QUOTATION MARK

TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET. TORTOISE. SHELL. 🐢 someone at the Unicode Consortium looked at 〔〕 and said "yes. tortoise." and they were RIGHT.

꧁ ꧂ — U+A9C1, U+A9C2 — JAVANESE LEFT/RIGHT RERENGGAN
﴾ ﴿ — U+FD3E, U+FD3F — ORNATE LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
﹙ ﹚ — U+FE59, U+FE5A — SMALL LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
﹛ ﹜ — U+FE5B, U+FE5C — SMALL LEFT/RIGHT CURLY BRACKET
﹝ ﹞ — U+FE5D, U+FE5E — SMALL LEFT/RIGHT TORTOISE SHELL BRACKET
﹤ ﹥ — U+FE64, U+FE65 — SMALL LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN SIGN
（ ） — U+FF08, U+FF09 — FULLWIDTH LEFT/RIGHT PARENTHESIS
＜ ＞ — U+FF1C, U+FF1E — FULLWIDTH LESS-THAN/GREATER-THAN SIGN
［ ］ — U+FF3B, U+FF3D — FULLWIDTH LEFT/RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET
｛ ｝ — U+FF5B, U+FF5D — FULLWIDTH LEFT/RIGHT CURLY BRACKET
｟ ｠ — U+FF5F, U+FF60 — FULLWIDTH LEFT/RIGHT WHITE PARENTHESIS
｢ ｣ — U+FF62, U+FF63 — HALFWIDTH LEFT/RIGHT CORNER BRACKET
￫ ￩ — U+FFEB, U+FFE9 — HALFWIDTH RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW

꧁ ꧂ bestie. ꧁ ꧂. that's not a bracket that's a whole DECORATION, that's what you put around your name in your minecraft server title 💅👑

𝄃 𝄂 — U+1D103, U+1D102 — MUSICAL SYMBOL REVERSE FINAL BARLINE, MUSICAL SYMBOL FINAL BARLINE
𝄆 𝄇 — U+1D106, U+1D107 — MUSICAL SYMBOL LEFT/RIGHT REPEAT SIGN
👉 👈 — U+1F449, U+1F448 — WHITE RIGHT/LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX
🔈 🕨 — U+1F508, U+1F568 — SPEAKER, RIGHT SPEAKER
🔉 🕩 — U+1F509, U+1F569 — SPEAKER WITH ONE SOUND WAVE, RIGHT SPEAKER WITH ONE SOUND WAVE
🔊 🕪 — U+1F50A, U+1F56A — SPEAKER WITH THREE SOUND WAVES, RIGHT SPEAKER WITH THREE SOUND WAVES
🕻 🕽 — U+1F57B, U+1F57D — LEFT/RIGHT HAND TELEPHONE RECEIVER
🖙 🖘 — U+1F599, U+1F598 — SIDEWAYS WHITE RIGHT/LEFT POINTING INDEX
🖛 🖚 — U+1F59B, U+1F59A — SIDEWAYS BLACK RIGHT/LEFT POINTING INDEX
🖝 🖜 — U+1F59D, U+1F59C — BLACK RIGHT/LEFT POINTING BACKHAND INDEX

👉👈 bestie this is THE emoji pair, the shy one, the "is it ok if i…", the absolute icon of the list. and the speaker emojis coming in one-wave and three-wave versions on BOTH sides?? volume controls said "we contain multitudes" 🔊🔊🔊

and there we are, the pair list doing its thing, all the lefts and rights accounted for, nothing skipped, nothing merged, every single codepoint present and accounted for 🫶

okay bestie we're STILL deep in the arrow zone and honestly?? it's giving typography museum after hours 🏛️✨ we're now cruising through the Geometric Shapes Extended block, where the format stays the same the whole way down: the right-pointing glyph first, its left-pointing mirror second, then the two code points as a pair, then the Unicode name in ALL CAPS screaming at you. the numbers just keep climbing, which is lowkey satisfying to watch. 💅

first up: the three-rayed weirdos and the triangle-arrowhead starter pack.

        🗦  🗧    U+1F5E6, U+1F5E7 THREE RAYS LEFT/RIGHT
        🠂  🠀    U+1F802, U+1F800 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH SMALL TRIANGLE
                                 ARROWHEAD
        🠆  🠄    U+1F806, U+1F804 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH MEDIUM TRIANGLE
                                 ARROWHEAD
        🠊  🠈    U+1F80A, U+1F808 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH LARGE TRIANGLE
                                 ARROWHEAD

not U+1F5E6 and U+1F5E7 being the random elders of the group sitting way up at the top of the list — those two aren't even arrows, they're THREE RAYS LEFT/RIGHT, and honestly, respect for the range. 🙈 the rest of this batch is the small → medium → large triangle arrowhead trio, and notice how MEDIUM and LARGE both needed a line wrap because the names were too long. the wrapping is doing its best, bless. 😭

next: the equilateral era. equilateral = the arrowhead is a proper little triangle, no skew, no notes. 💖

        🠒  🠐    U+1F812, U+1F810 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH SMALL EQUILATERAL
                                 ARROWHEAD
        🠖  🠔    U+1F816, U+1F814 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH EQUILATERAL ARROWHEAD
        🠚  🠘    U+1F81A, U+1F818 HEAVY RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH EQUILATERAL
                                 ARROWHEAD
        🠞  🠜    U+1F81E, U+1F81C HEAVY RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH LARGE
                                 EQUILATERAL ARROWHEAD

see how the escalation goes plain → HEAVY → HEAVY + LARGE? it's a whole glow-up arc for a triangle. 🎀

and now: the shaft discourse. same triangle-headed arrows, but the stick part has OPINIONS.

        🠢  🠠    U+1F822, U+1F820 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH
                                 NARROW SHAFT
        🠦  🠤    U+1F826, U+1F824 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH
                                 MEDIUM SHAFT
        🠪  🠨    U+1F82A, U+1F828 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH BOLD
                                 SHAFT
        🠮  🠬    U+1F82E, U+1F82C RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH
                                 HEAVY SHAFT
        🠲  🠰    U+1F832, U+1F830 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE-HEADED ARROW WITH VERY
                                 HEAVY SHAFT

NARROW, MEDIUM, BOLD, HEAVY, VERY HEAVY — bestie the shaft got a whole character arc. 💀

then the personality lineup: finger-post, squared, compressed, heavy compressed, heavy, sans-serif. no notes, just vibes.

        🠶  🠴    U+1F836, U+1F834 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS FINGER-POST ARROW
        🠺  🠸    U+1F83A, U+1F838 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS SQUARED ARROW
        🠾  🠼    U+1F83E, U+1F83C RIGHT/LEFTWARDS COMPRESSED ARROW
        🡂  🡀    U+1F842, U+1F840 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HEAVY COMPRESSED ARROW
        🡆  🡄    U+1F846, U+1F844 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HEAVY ARROW
        🡒  🡐    U+1F852, U+1F850 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS SANS-SERIF ARROW

the SANS-SERIF one is the main character here, periodt. 👑

barb szn: wide-headed barbs, going LIGHT → plain → MEDIUM → HEAVY → VERY HEAVY. the last one wrapped onto its own line and it EARNED that. 🔥

        🡢  🡠    U+1F862, U+1F860 WIDE-HEADED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS LIGHT BARB ARROW
        🡪  🡨    U+1F86A, U+1F868 WIDE-HEADED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS BARB ARROW
        🡲  🡰    U+1F872, U+1F870 WIDE-HEADED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS MEDIUM BARB ARROW
        🡺  🡸    U+1F87A, U+1F878 WIDE-HEADED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS HEAVY BARB ARROW
        🢂  🢀    U+1F882, U+1F880 WIDE-HEADED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS VERY HEAVY BARB
                                 ARROW

and the grand finale: the white/shaded/notched/tilted artsy crew. this is where the naming committee started having FUN. 🌈

        🢒  🢐    U+1F892, U+1F890 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TRIANGLE ARROWHEAD
        🢖  🢔    U+1F896, U+1F894 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS WHITE ARROW WITHIN TRIANGLE
                                 ARROWHEAD
        🢚  🢘    U+1F89A, U+1F898 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH NOTCHED TAIL
        🢡  🢠    U+1F8A1, U+1F8A0 RIGHTWARDS BOTTOM SHADED WHITE ARROW,
                                 LEFTWARDS BOTTOM-SHADED WHITE ARROW
        🢣  🢢    U+1F8A3, U+1F8A2 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS TOP SHADED WHITE ARROW
        🢥  🢦    U+1F8A5, U+1F8A6 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS RIGHT-SHADED WHITE ARROW
        🢧  🢤    U+1F8A7, U+1F8A4 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS LEFT-SHADED WHITE ARROW
        🢩  🢨    U+1F8A9, U+1F8A8 RIGHT/LEFTWARDS BACK-TILTED SHADOWED WHITE ARROW
        🢫  🢪    U+1F8AB, U+1F8AA RIGHT/LEFTWARDS FRONT-TILTED SHADOWED WHITE
                                 ARROW
        🢶  🢴    U+1F8B6, U+1F8B4 NEGATIVE SQUARED RIGHT/LEFTWARDS ARROW

okay not me clocking the U+1F8A1 / U+1F8A0 line 👀 — that one drops the slash format completely and goes RIGHTWARDS BOTTOM SHADED WHITE ARROW, (comma, no hyphen) and then LEFTWARDS BOTTOM-SHADED WHITE ARROW (hyphen, no comma). inconsistent queen behavior, but we love her. 🙈

also peep U+1F8B6, U+1F8B4 at the very end — the numbers go backwards there, and U+1F8A5, U+1F8A6 and U+1F8A7, U+1F8A4 and U+1F8A9, U+1F8A8 and U+1F8AB, U+1F8AA all keep you on your toes too. tiny plot twists, we stan. 💜

aaaand that's the whole entire page, bestie!! 💖 the source on this one is perl v5.42.3, dated 2026-08-03, and the page itself is PERLOP(1) — so go forth, use your arrows responsibly, and remember: the vibes are immaculate but the details are sacred. ily, mwah 🫶✨🌸

📦 where this page comes from

fedora 43: perl-doc 5.42.3-524.fc43 · (GPL-1.0-or-later OR Artistic-1.0-Perl) AND Unicode-3.0 AND LicenseRef-Fedora-UltraPermissive
fedora 44: perl-doc 5.42.3-525.fc44 · (GPL-1.0-or-later OR Artistic-1.0-Perl) AND Unicode-3.0 AND LicenseRef-Fedora-UltraPermissive
💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on 2026-10-13: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms

PERLOP(1)

💖 PERLOP(1) — the perlop page, bestie edition 💖

🌸 NAME 🌸

🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

🧮 Operator Precedence and Associativity 🧮

🔗 Chaining, babes 🔗

📋 The Precedence Table (highest → lowest) 📋

🎀 Terms and List Operators (Leftward) 🎀

➡️ The Arrow Operator ➡️

💅 Auto-increment and Auto-decrement 💅

⭐ Exponentiation ⭐

🎀 Symbolic Unary Operators 🎀

🌸 Binding Operators 🌸

🔥 Multiplicative Operators 🔥

💜 Additive Operators 💜

🌈 Shift Operators 🌈

🧚 Named Unary Operators 🧚

👑 Class Instance Operator 👑

🌸 Relational Operators 🌸

🎀 Equality Operators 🎀

🧚 Smartmatch Operator 🧚

Right operand is an ARRAY:

Right operand is a HASH:

Right operand is CODE:

💜 Right operand is a Regexp:

🌸 Notes 🌸

🦋 Smartmatching of Objects 🦋

⭐ Bitwise And ⭐

🌈 Bitwise Or and Exclusive Or 🌈

🎀 C-style Logical And 🎀

💜 C-style Logical Or, Xor, and Defined Or 💜

🌈 Range Operators 🌈

💖 Conditional Operator 💖

👑 Assignment Operators 👑

💬 Comma Operator 💬

➡️ List Operators (Rightward) ⬅️

🚫 Logical Not 🚫

🎀 Logical And 🎀

🔀 Logical or and Exclusive Or 🔀

💀 C Operators Missing From Perl 💀

🎀 Quote and Quote-like Operators 🎀

✨ Simpler Quote-Like Operators ✨

💖 q/STRING/, 'STRING' 💖

🎀 qq/STRING/, "STRING" 🎀

🦋 qx/STRING/, `STRING` 🦋

🍓 qw/STRING/ 🍓

🔥 Regexp Quote-Like Operators 🔥

👑 qr/STRING/msixpodualn 👑

💖 "m/PATTERN/msixpodualngc" 💖

🦋 "/PATTERN/msixpodualngc" 🦋

🌸 The empty pattern // 🌸

💜 Matching in list context 💜

✨ \G assertion ✨

💅 m?PATTERN?msixpodualngc

💅 s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/msixpodualngcer

🎀 Transliteration Quote-Like Operators

the tr / y era 💅✨

portable ranges: the plot twist 🌈

OPTIONS 💖

examples because we love a demo 🌸</seach>

✨ Here-docs ✨

✨ Quoting the delimiter ✨

✨ Double Quotes ✨

✨ Single Quotes ✨

✨ Backticks ✨

✨ Gory details of parsing quoted constructs ✨

✨ Finding the end ✨

✨ Interpolation ✨

<<'EOF'

m'', the pattern of s'''

'', q//, tr''', y''', the replacement of s'''

tr///, y///

"", backticks, qq//, qx//, <file*glob>, <<"EOF"

The replacement of s///

RE in m?RE?, /RE/, m/RE/, s/RE/foo/

🔥 Parsing regular expressions 🔥

🔧 Optimization of regular expressions 🔧

🎀 I/O Operators 🎀

✨ Constant Folding ✨

No-ops 🦋

💖 PERLOP(1) — the `perlop` page, bestie edition 💖

💖 `q/STRING/`, `'STRING'` 💖

🎀 `qq/STRING/`, `"STRING"` 🎀

🦋 `qx/STRING/`, `STRING` 🦋

🍓 `qw/STRING/` 🍓

👑 `qr/STRING/msixpodualn` 👑

💖 `"m/PATTERN/msixpodualngc"` 💖

🦋 `"/PATTERN/msixpodualngc"` 🦋

🌸 The empty pattern `//` 🌸

✨ `\G` assertion ✨

💅 `m?PATTERN?msixpodualngc`

💅 `s/PATTERN/REPLACEMENT/msixpodualngcer`

the `tr` / `y` era 💅✨

`<<'EOF'`

`m''`, the pattern of `s'''`

`''`, `q//`, `tr'''`, `y'''`, the replacement of `s'''`

`tr///`, `y///`

`""`, backticks, `qq//`, `qx//`, `<file*glob>`, `<<"EOF"`

The replacement of `s///`

`RE` in `m?RE?`, `/RE/`, `m/RE/`, `s/RE/foo/`