Perl Today (February 2014)
brian d foy explores the state of Perl in 2014 by soliciting opinions from various respected Perl programmers.
brian d foy explores the state of Perl in 2014 by soliciting opinions from various respected Perl programmers.
Perl had a great year in 2013. Here are some highlights.
Ever had a program crash and wanted to get more details about where and why? The CPAN module Carp::Always is perfect for this.
Many practical programming problems require you to parse data. Ron Savage continues his demonstration of Marpa and other tools and techniques for lexing and parsing data. Put down the regexps; get it right this time.
When JT Smith ported his web game The Lacuna Expanse to a board game, he used Perl to create the board game itself. Here’s how he built the web service behind The Game Crafter.
When JT Smith ported his web game The Lacuna Expanse to a board game, he used Perl to automate things. Here’s how he did it.
Kevin Carillo asks for assistance surveying newcomers to the Perl community about their experiences, positive and otherwise.
Perl programmers spend a lot of time reading, modifying, and writing data. When regular expressions aren’t enough, turn to something more powerful: parsing.
Thanks to Torsten Raudssus, who wrote in with this announcement. What is Plat_Forms? Plat_Forms is a contest and competition in which top-class teams of three programmers compete to implement the same requirements for a web-based system within two days, using…
editor’s note: an earlier version of this article appeared at The Reluctant Perl Programmer. Per the suggestion of Ask Bjørn Hansen, this revision appears on Perl.com. Who We Are We all love Perl for different reasons. Some of us are…
This series has shown you several features of Unicode by example, as well as several techniques for working with Unicode correctly and easily with recent releases of Perl 5. By now you know more than many programmers do about Unicode,…
℞ 44: PROGRAM: Demo of Unicode collation and printing The past several weeks of Unicode recipes have explained how Unicode works and shown how to use it in your programs. If you’ve gone through those recipes, you now understand more…
℞ 43: Unicode text in DBM hashes, the easy way Some Perl libraries require you to jump through hoops to handle Unicode data. Would that everything worked as easily as Perl’s open pragma! For DBM files, here’s how to implicitly…
℞ 42: Unicode text in DBM hashes, the tedious way While Perl 5 has long been very careful about handling Unicode correctly inside the world of Perl itself, every time you leave the Perl internals, you cross a boundary at…
℞ 41: Unicode linebreaking If you’ve ever tried to fit a large amount of text into a display area too narrow for the full width of the text, you’ve dealt with the joy of linebreaking (or word wrapping). As you…
℞ 40: Case- and accent-insensitive locale comparisons You now know how to compare Unicode strings while ignoring case and accent differences. This approach uses the standard Unicode collation algorithm. To perform a similar comparison while respecting a specific locale’s rules,…
℞ 39: Case- and accent-insensitive comparisons As you’ve noticed by now, many Unicode strings have multiple possible representations. Comparing two Unicode strings for equality requires far more than merely comparing their codepoints. Not only must you account for multiple representations,…
℞ 38: Making cmp work on text instead of codepoints Even with Perl 5.12’s “unicode_strings” feature, some of Perl’s core operations do not perform as expected on Unicode strings by default. For example, how is the cmp operator to know…
℞ 37: Unicode locale collation As you’ve already seen, Unicode-aware sorting respects Unicode character properties. You can’t sort by codepoint and expect to get accurate results, not even if you stick with pure ASCII. The world is a complicated place….
℞ 36: Case- and accent-insensitive Unicode sort The Unicode Collation Algorithm defines several levels of collation strength by which you can specify certain character properties as relevant or irrelevant to the collation ordering. In simple terms, you can use collation…