Perl Fundamentals

Learn how to create lists to group multiple values and use arrays to hold those values. Practice looping through arrays and adding or removing items from an array.

Explore Perl lists and arrays, accessing elements by index, and mastering scalar and array contexts. Learn list assignment, slicing, joining, splitting, and other array operations.

Group values into a list literal, assign it to an array, and use the array as a container to easily manipulate items.

Explore creating lists in Perl with literals, quoted words, and splitting techniques, using a chef's knife to slice, dice, or raise as we wish.

Master array manipulation in Perl with push, pop, shift, and unshift, including destructive behavior. Explore sorting, reversing, scalar vs array context, and split and join with regex.

The demo shows how the quoted word operator handles custom delimiters to create lists and assign them to arrays, with items moving to and from arrays.

Learn how to create a Perl script that accepts user input by pausing execution and prompting at the command line to enter data.

Learn to read input from the command line using standard input and the diamond operator, trim trailing newlines with chomp or chop, and handle command line arguments with ARGV.

Run Perl to read command line input with a simple operator, capturing up to the newline as a string. See how Perl coerces these strings into numbers when needed.

Discover how programs read data from files using file handles, enabling non-interactive execution without waiting for user input.

Learn to open and read or write files in Perl using file handles, three-part open, append and redirect, plus die-based error handling and the diamond operator for flexible input.

Perl uses the operating system's default encoding to read and write files. Perl makes your script data persistent and safe for later use.

Explore how hashes provide one-to-one mappings from a string key to a single value, such as an id number uniquely mapping to a name, in Perl.

Learn hashing in Perl fundamentals by building and manipulating hashes with string keys, percent sign, and curly braces, including adding, updating, and sorting by keys or values.

Explore how Perl makes it easy to add and remove items from a hash, check for a value's existence for a key, and use existence as a conditional in scripts.

Explore how Perl subroutines package repeated steps for reuse, reducing duplication and enabling you to apply the same logic wherever needed.

Define and call subroutines in Perl, use the defined function to trap errors from undefined variables, and use various call styles with return values from the last expression.

We saw basic subroutines and learned that they return the last expression Perl evaluated, which can lead to surprising results if we're not careful.

Explore how to pass arguments to subroutines and return values in Perl, using parameters to send data and retrieve results.

Learn how Perl passes arguments to subroutines via the default array, uses shift for variable lists, and returns values explicitly or implicitly with lexical scope via my and strict.

Pass values to a Perl subroutine using the default array variable or the @_ . Accept the implicit return value or explicitly set what to return.

Discover how regular expressions, patterns of characters, find matches anywhere in text, and see how Perl makes this easy.

Explore regular expressions in Perl fundamentals, learn to pattern match, delimiters, and the match binding operator to search, extract, or replace text across strings.

Explore how regular expression patterns are placed in delimiters with the optional match operator and how a match's existence can be treated as a boolean value.

Explore how metacharacters extend regular expressions beyond basic letters by using Perl's shorthand characters to describe pre-built patterns, with a practical, hands-on demonstration.

Explore perl regular expressions, including metacharacters, anchors, character classes, quantifiers, greediness and non-greedy matching, escapes, alternation, and capture groups to describe complex patterns.

Master metacharacters in Perl regular expressions by using character classes and types such as whitespace, digits, letters, and word boundaries to craft precise patterns.

Explore how to find text patterns and, more importantly, how to change and replace that text using Perl's simple mechanism. See how Perl demonstrates practical text manipulation.

Explore text manipulation with regular expressions by substituting matches, using capture groups and backreferences, applying global replacements, and controlling greediness to transform strings in Perl.

Explore Perl's substitution operator to find and replace patterns with alternate text, and learn how to slice and dice text to your liking.