use warnings
or use the -w switch; see warnings and "-w" in perlrun. The second biggest trap is not making your entire program runnable under use stric
t
. The third biggest trap is not reading the list of changes in this version of Perl; see perldelta.
-n
or-p
.
The English module, loaded via
use English;
allows you to refer to special variables (like $/
) with names (like $RS), as though they were in awk; see perlvar for details.
Semicolons are required after all simple statements in Perl (except at the end of a block). Newline is not a statement delimiter.
Curly brackets are required on if
s and while
s.
Variables begin with "$", "@" or "%" in Perl.
Arrays index from 0. Likewise string positions in substr() and index().
You have to decide whether your array has numeric or string indices.
Hash values do not spring into existence upon mere reference.
You have to decide whether you want to use string or numeric comparisons.
Reading an input line does not split it for you. You get to split it to an array yourself. And the split() operator has different arguments than awk's.
The current input line is normally in $_, not $0. It generally does not have the newline stripped. ($0 is the name of the program executed.) See perlvar.
$<digit> does not refer to fields--it refers to substrings matched by the last match pattern.
The print() statement does not add field and record separators unless you set $,
and $\
. You can set $OFS and $ORS if you're using the English module.
You must open your files before you print to them.
The range operator is "..", not comma. The comma operator works as in C.
The match operator is "=~", not "~". ("~" is the one's complement operator, as in C.)
The exponentiation operator is "**", not "^". "^" is the XOR operator, as in C. (You know, one could get the feeling that awk is basically incompatible with C.)
The concatenation operator is ".", not the null string. (Using the null string would render /p
at/ /pat/
unparsable, because the third slash would be interpreted as a division operator--the tokenizer is in fact slightly context sensitive for operators like "/", "?", and ">". And in fact, "." itself can be the beginning of a number.)
The next
, exit
, and continue
keywords work differently.
The following variables work differently:
Awk Perl
ARGC scalar @ARGV (compare with $#ARGV)
ARGV[0] $0
FILENAME $ARGV
FNR $. - something
FS (whatever you like)
NF $#Fld, or some such
NR $.
OFMT $#
OFS $,
ORS $\
RLENGTH length($&)
RS $/
RSTART length($`)
SUBSEP $;
You cannot set $RS to a pattern, only a string.
When in doubt, run the awk construct through a2p and see what it gives you.
if
's and while
's.
You must use elsif
rather than else if
.
The break
and continue
keywords from C become in Perl last
and next
, respectively. Unlike in C, these do not work within a d
o { } while
construct. See "Loop Control" in perlsyn.
The switch statement is called given
/when
and only available in perl 5.10 or newer. See "Switch Statements" in perlsyn.
Variables begin with "$", "@" or "%" in Perl.
Comments begin with "#", not "/*" or "//". Perl may interpret C/C++ comments as division operators, unterminated regular expressions or the defined-or operator.
You can't take the address of anything, although a similar operator in Perl is the backslash, which creates a reference.
ARGV
must be capitalized. $ARGV
[0]
is C'sargv[1]
, and argv[0]
ends up in $0
.
System calls such as link(), unlink(), rename(), etc. return nonzero for success, not 0. (system(), however, returns zero for success.)
Signal handlers deal with signal names, not numbers. Use kill
-l
to find their names on your system.
+
is always addition. $string1 + $string2
converts both strings to numbers and then adds them. To concatenate two strings, use the .
operator.
The +
unary operator doesn't do anything in Perl. It exists to avoid syntactic ambiguities.
Unlike for...in
, Perl'sfor
(also spelled foreach
) does not allow the left-hand side to be an arbitrary expression. It must be a variable:
for my $variable (keys %hash) {
...
}
Furthermore, don't forget the k
eys
in there, as foreach my $kv
(%hash) {}
iterates over the keys and values, and is generally not useful ($kv would be a key, then a value, and so on).
To iterate over the indices of an array, use foreach my $i (0 .
. $#array) {}
. foreach my $v (@
array) {}
iterates over the values.
Perl requires braces following if
, while
, foreach
, etc.
In Perl, else if
is spelled els
if
.
? :
has higher precedence than assignment. In JavaScript, one can write:
condition ? do_something() : variable = 3
and the variable is only assigned if the condition is false. In Perl, you need parentheses:
$condition ? do_something() : ($variable = 3);
Or just use if
.
Perl requires semicolons to separate statements.
Variables declared with my
only affect code after the declaration. You cannot write $x = 1; my
$x;
and expect the first assignment to affect the same variable. It will instead assign to an $x
declared previously in an outer scope, or to a global variable.
Note also that the variable is not visible until the following statement. This means that in my $x = 1 + $x
the second $x refers to one declared previously.
my
variables are scoped to the current block, not to the current function. If you write {my $x
;} $x;
, the second $x
does not refer to the one declared inside the block.
An object's members cannot be made accessible as variables. The closest Perl equivalent to wi
th(object) { method() }
isfor
, which can alias $_
to the object:
for ($object) {
$_->method;
}
The object or class on which a method is called is passed as one of the method's arguments, not as a separate this
value.
-n
or-p
.
Backreferences in substitutions use "$" rather than "\".
The pattern matching metacharacters "(", ")", and "|" do not have backslashes in front.
The range operator is ...
, rather than comma.
BEGIN
blocks, which execute at compile time).
The arguments are available via @ARGV, not $1, $2, etc.
The environment is not automatically made available as separate scalar variables.
The shell'stest
uses "=", "!=", "<" etc for string comparisons and "-eq", "-ne", "-lt" etc for numeric comparisons. This is the reverse of Perl, which uses eq
, ne
, lt
for string comparisons, and ==
, !=
<
etc for numeric comparisons.
while (<FH>) { }
while (defined($_ = <FH>)) { }..
<FH>; # data discarded!
Remember not to use =
when you need =~
; these two constructs are quite different:
$x = /foo/;
$x =~ /foo/;
The do {}
construct isn't a real loop that you can use loop control on.
Use my()
for local variables whenever you can get away with it (but see perlform for where you can't). Using local()
actually gives a local value to a global variable, which leaves you open to unforeseen side-effects of dynamic scoping.
If you localize an exported variable in a module, its exported value will not change. The local name becomes an alias to a new value but the external name is still an alias for the original.
As always, if any of these are ever officially declared as bugs, they'll be fixed and removed.
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