Using qq
- "qq" is another Perl trick which helps a
programmer solve the double-quote problem by allowing her to
change the double-quote delimiter in a print statement.
- Normally, as we said, double-quotes (")
are used to delimit the characters in a print statement. However,
by replacing the first quote with two q's followed by another
character, that final character becomes the new print statement
delimiter. Thus, by using "qq!", we tell Perl to use the bang (!)
character to delimit the string instead of the double quotes.
- For example, without using qq, a print
statement that outputs, 'She said, "hi"'. would be written as
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "She said, \"hi\".";
- But with the qq making bang (!) the new
delimiter, the same statement can be written as
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print qq!She said, "hi"!;
- Why would we do this? Readability. If
the print statement was surrounded with the normal double-quotes,
then every double-quote would have to be escaped with a backslash
whenever it was used within a string. The backslashes clutter
the readability of the string. Thus, we choose a different
character to delimit the string in the print statement so that we
do not have to escape the double-quotes with backslashes.
Printing with Here Documents
Table of Contents
Using the printf and sprintf functions
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