Perl Tip 3: Alternative quote characters; get rid of the mess

We are at the Perl Conference in San Diego having lots of fun and
learning lots of cool new stuff. Be sure to follow the coverage at
http://use.perl.org/ and http://www.perl.com/  :-)

On to the tip: Anyone have seen code like

  print "<a href=\"http://$url/\">$site</a> (\"$title\")";

Now, it is quite annoying to read all those \'s, so you would think
there is a better way.

Well, there is! :-)

The above line could be written as 

  print qq[<a href="http://$url/">$site</a> ("$title")];

So instead of using " as the quote operator we used qq[ and ] to end
the quote.

You can also use for example qq{ (or any other form of "brackets"), like
  
  print qq{...};


Like "text" can be substituted with qq[text] you can use a single q
for ', so a confusing statement like

  '\'[email protected]\'' 

can be written as

  q['[email protected]']

instead.


For more information, run "perldoc perlop" and search for "Quote and
Quote-like Operators".


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