If you're looking to do something in Perl and the back of your mind tells you that, surely, someone's done this before then there are two things to note:
• Someone probably HAS and
• It's probably available on the
CPAN or as a built in module.
Thus when I was asked the question "How do I get coloured text in a terminal window in Perl" last week, I know there was going to be a module out there - and there is -
Term::ANSIColor.
As ever, there's an excellent set of reference notes on th CPAN, but no complete cut-and-paste-this sample for you to try out, so I've written one and it's
available here.
(written 2006-05-29, updated 2008-12-09)
Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles
P219 - Perl - Libraries and Resources [86] Talk review - Idiomatic Perl, David Cross - (2004-10-12)
[112] Avoid the wheel being re-invented by using Perl modules - (2004-11-08)
[357] Where do Perl modules load from - (2005-06-24)
[358] Use standard Perl modules - (2005-06-25)
[712] Why reinvent the wheel - (2006-05-06)
[760] Self help in Perl - (2006-06-14)
[1219] Judging the quality of contributed Perl code - (2007-06-06)
[1235] Outputting numbers as words - MySQL with Perl or PHP - (2007-06-17)
[1391] Ordnance Survey Grid Reference to Latitude / Longitude - (2007-10-14)
[1444] Using English can slow you right down! - (2007-11-25)
[1863] About dieing and exiting in Perl - (2008-11-01)
[1865] Debugging and Data::Dumper in Perl - (2008-11-02)
[2229] Do not re-invent the wheel - use a Perl module - (2009-06-11)
[2234] Loading external code into Perl from a nonstandard directory - (2009-06-12)
[2427] Operator overloading - redefining addition and other Perl tricks - (2009-09-27)
[2931] Syncronise - software, trains, and buses. Please! - (2010-08-22)
[3009] Expect in Perl - a short explanation and a practical example - (2010-10-22)
[3101] The week before Christmas - (2010-12-23)
[3377] What do I mean when I add things in Perl? - (2011-08-02)
P212 - Perl - More on Character Strings [453] Commenting Perl regular expressions - (2005-09-30)
[583] Remember to process blank lines - (2006-01-31)
[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)
[608] Don't expose your regular expressions - (2006-02-15)
[928] C++ and Perl - why did they do it THAT way? - (2006-11-16)
[943] Matching within multiline strings, and ignoring case in regular expressions - (2006-11-25)
[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)
[2874] Unpacking a Perl string into a list - (2010-07-16)
[2877] Further more advanced Perl examples - (2010-07-19)
[2993] Arrays v Lists - what is the difference, why use one or the other - (2010-10-10)
[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)
[3411] Single and double quotes strings in Perl - what is the difference? - (2011-08-30)
[3546] The difference between dot (a.k.a. full stop, period) and comma in Perl - (2011-12-09)
[3630] Serialsing and unserialising data for storage and transfer in Perl - (2012-02-28)
[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)
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