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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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