Perl v5.22’s regexes added four Unicode boundaries to go along with the vanilla “word” boundary, \b, that you’ve been using for years. These new assertions aren’t going to match perfectly with your expectations of human languages (the holy grail of natural language processing), but they do okay-ish. Although these appear in v5.22.0, as a late edition to the language they were partially broken in the initial release. They were fixed for v5.22.1. Continue reading “Perl v5.22 adds fancy Unicode word boundaries”
Category: 5.22
Create named variable aliases with ref aliasing
Perl v5.22’s experimental refaliasing feature adds the ability to alias a named variable to another named variable, or alias a named variable to a reference. This doesn’t copy the data; you end up with another named variable for the same data. As with all such features, the details and syntax may change or the feature may be removed all together (according to perlpolicy). Update: Also see v5.26’s declared_refs experimental feature.
Continue reading “Create named variable aliases with ref aliasing”
Make bitwise operators always use numeric context
[This feature is no longer experimental, starting in v5.28. Declaring use 5.28 automatically enables them.]
Most Perl operators force their context on the values. For example, the numeric addition operator, +, forces its values to be numbers. To “add” strings, you use a separate operator, the string concatenation operator, . (which looks odd at the end of a sentence).
The bitwise operators, however, look at the value to determine their context. With a lefthand value that has a numeric component, the bitwise operators do numeric things. With a lefthand value that’s a string, the bit operators become string operators. That’s certainly one of Perl’s warts, which I’ll fix at the end of this article with a new feature from v5.22. Continue reading “Make bitwise operators always use numeric context”
Perl v5.22 adds hexadecimal floating point literals
You can specify literal hexadecimal floating-point numbers in v5.22, just as you can in C99, Java, Ruby, and other languages do. Perl, which uses doubles to store floating-point numbers, can represent a limited set of values. Up to now, you’ve had to specify those floating point numbers in decimal, hoping that a double could exactly represent that number. That hope, sometimes unfounded, is the basis for the common newbie question about floating point errors. Continue reading “Perl v5.22 adds hexadecimal floating point literals”
Use Perl 5.22’s <<>> operator for safe command-line handling
We’ve had the three argument open since Perl 5.6. This allows you to separate the way you want to interact with the file from the filename.
Old Perl requires you to include the mode and filename together, giving Perl the opportunity to interpret what you mean: Continue reading “Use Perl 5.22’s <<>> operator for safe command-line handling”
Perl 5.22 new features
The first Perl 5.22 release candidate is out and there are some new operators and many enhancements to regular expressions that look interesting, along with some improvements that don’t require any work from you. Some of the features are experimental, so be careful that you don’t create problems by overusing them until they settle down. Continue reading “Perl 5.22 new features”