In Perl, there's usually more than one way of doing it ...
If you're writing a string of text into your program, your first possibility is to use single quotes - in which case you're writing a literal string with everything between the single quote chartacters included exactly in the string. And your second possibility is to use double quotes - which are actually an operator, and \ $ and @ characters within the string trigger "escaping" of the following characters, and inclusion of variable contents.
Here's some code to show that:
$name = Bob;
@choice = ("Tea",'Coffee');
print 'Here is $name choosing from @choice\n';
print "\n";
print "Here is $name choosing from @choice\n";
And that runs as follows:
munchkin:ap3 grahamellis$ perl asy
Here is $name choosing from @choice\n
Here is Bob choosing from Tea Coffee
munchkin:ap3 grahamellis$
If you really want to include a " within a "'d string, you can use \", but you shouldn't be able to use the same technique to include a ' within a 'd string (in practise, there's an exception made that lets you do so!!). However, all this extra quoting of delimiters gets messy so you can
choose your own special characters as the delimiter using the
qq notation for a double quoted string and the
q notation for a single quoted string:
$name = Bob;
@choice = (qq!Tea!,q%Coffee%);
print q#Here is $name choosing from @choice\n#;
print qq"\n";
print qq(Here is $name choosing from @choice\n);
Output is identical to what you saw just above. Just about any special character may be used - even the # which is normally used for comments; if you use an open bracket or brace, then the closing character should be the opposing bracket of brace - otherwise the close is the same as the open. And your choice of special character only lasts for the one string.
Want still more flexibilty? You can use a "here document" where the delimiter used is an entire word of your choice! There's a previous article about here documents ...
[here] ;-).
(written 2011-08-30)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
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[586] Perl Regular Expressions - finding the position and length of the match - (2006-02-02)
[597] Storing a regular expression in a perl variable - (2006-02-09)
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[928] C++ and Perl - why did they do it THAT way? - (2006-11-16)
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[1222] Perl, the substitute operator s - (2007-06-08)
[1230] Commenting a Perl Regular Expression - (2007-06-12)
[1251] Substitute operator / modifiers in Perl - (2007-06-28)
[1305] Regular expressions made easy - building from components - (2007-08-16)
[1336] Ignore case in Regular Expression - (2007-09-08)
[1510] Handling Binary data (.gif file example) in Perl - (2008-01-17)
[1727] Equality and looks like tests - Perl - (2008-07-29)
[1735] Finding words and work boundaries (MySQL, Perl, PHP) - (2008-08-03)
[1947] Perl substitute - the e modifier - (2008-12-16)
[2230] Running a piece of code is like drinking a pint of beer - (2009-06-11)
[2379] Making variables persistant, pretending a database is a variable and other Perl tricks - (2009-08-27)
[2657] Want to do a big batch edit? Nothing beats Perl! - (2010-03-01)
[2801] Binary data handling with unpack in Perl - (2010-06-10)
[2834] Teaching examples in Perl - third and final part - (2010-06-27)
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[2877] Further more advanced Perl examples - (2010-07-19)
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[3059] Object Orientation in an hour and other Perl Lectures - (2010-11-18)
[3100] Looking ahead and behind in Regular Expressions - double matching - (2010-12-23)
[3322] How much has Perl (and other languages) changed? - (2011-06-10)
[3332] DNA to Amino Acid - a sample Perl script - (2011-06-24)
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[3650] Possessive Regular Expression Matching - Perl, Objective C and some other languages - (2012-03-12)
[3707] Converting codons via Amino Acids to Proteins in Perl - (2012-04-25)
[3927] First match or all matches? Perl Regular Expressions - (2012-11-19)
[4452] Binary data handling - Python and Perl - (2015-03-09)
P205 - Perl - Initial String Handling [31] Here documents - (2004-08-28)
[254] x operator in Perl - (2005-03-22)
[324] The backtick operator in Python and Perl - (2005-05-25)
[970] String duplication - x in Perl, * in Python and Ruby - (2006-12-07)
[987] Ruby v Perl - interpollating variables - (2006-12-15)
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[1608] Underlining in Perl and Python - the x and * operator in use - (2008-04-12)
[1849] String matching in Perl with Regular Expressions - (2008-10-20)
[1860] Seven new intermediate Perl examples - (2008-10-30)
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[2816] Intelligent Matching in Perl - (2010-06-18)
[2832] Are you learning Perl? Some more examples for you! - (2010-06-27)
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[3547] Using Perl to generate multiple reports from a HUGE file, efficiently - (2011-12-09)
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Some other Articles
User defined sorting and other uses of callbacks in Tcl and TkPassing back multiple results in Tcl - upvar and uplevelIf its Sunday, must it be Weymouth?Handling binary data in Perl is easy!Single and double quotes strings in Perl - what is the difference?A review of the Summer Sunday extra trains on the TransWilts lineWhen variables behave differently - Tie in PerlJourney home by public transport for a Bank HolidayPerl - a quick reminder and revision. Test yourself!Not multidimentional arrays - but lists of lists. Much more flexible. Perl!