Perl Print Question

[jmsrickland]

In Perl if I do this:

print "$variable\n";

I get the contents of $variable

How do I print $variable as a text string and not it's contents?

For example, in Visual Basic, I can do this

Dim Name As String

Name = "James Rickland"

Print "Name = " & Name

and it appears like this: Name = James Rickland

This is what I want to do in Perl

print "$variable = $variable\n";

How to show $variable = as text

[tr333]

You can use PadWalker to achieve that, but I have to ask why you would want to? It's not a very common thing to do, and I've yet to come across a valid reason for needing it. If you are wanting to use it for debugging, then Data::Dumper and related modules are a better choice.

EDIT: On second thoughts, after reading your post again, I see it differently. You want to use single quotes around your string. Double-quoted strings do variable interpolation inside them while single-quoted strings do not. If it's for debugging, then I still would recommend using Data::Dumper and printing the output of Dumper($var) to stderr.

#!/usr/bin/perl -T
 
use warnings;
use strict;
 
my $foo = "bar";
print '$foo = ' . $foo;

[jmsrickland]

I'm not good at Perl so as I am trying to learn it I write very simple Perl scripts. I am a VB programmer and as I write in Perl I think VB on certain things so I think to myself, if this is how I do it in VB then maybe I can do similar in Perl.

Thanks, for your reply. That help a lot.

BTW:

What's with this my I see in your code. I have never used my so what does it do compared to not using my

[tr333]

my is for lexical scoping: http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Namespaces.html

You should always write your perl scripts with "use strict;" and "use warnings;". Assigning values to variables that haven't been defined with "my" will throw an error under "use strict;", which is a good thing

[jmsrickland]

OK, good to know that. Thanks again

[tr333]

And one more thing...

If you're doing web-related stuff with Perl, it's recommended to run your scripts under Taint mode.