Perl Tutorial

Perl Tutorial

The programming language developed by Larry Wall for text processing is Perl. Practical Extraction and Report Language describes Perl. Windows, Mac, OS, and UNIX platforms support Perl. Procedural and object-oriented programming is supported in Perl. The interpreter is used with different systems so that Perl works well with all the systems. Perl is used for system administration, web development, network programming, and GUI development. An interpreter is not needed for Perl as there is no compilation stage.  Perl is considered an in-between language of C and Python. Concepts and syntax are taken from different languages and integrate well with others.

Why do we need to learn Perl?

• Perl is a stable language that is used to perform on many platforms, so Perl is called as cross-platform language. There is a sequence of declarations and statements in the language.
• Many critical projects in public and private sectors are done using Perl as it is used in text processing. Also, it is open-source software.
• Many features from different languages such as C, Basic, awk, sed, and sh are taken into and used in Perl so that it integrates and uses different properties. HTML, XML, and many other markup languages integrate with Perl. Also, it supports Unicode.

Applications of Perl

• Perl is used in text manipulation and in different rapid development cycles, so it is one of the most popular web programming languages.
• The language is embedded into different web servers so that the processing speed can be increased to the maximum.
• Encrypted web data can be handled easily so that different transactions can be embedded in the Perl language. Apache web server is also easily embedded.
• Database integration can be done easily due to the Perl DBI package. Also, it is called as the duct tape of the internet.

Example

This is used to send a mail with the subject and body as Hai. From and To attributes are also defined in the example below:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Email::MIME;
my $message = Email::MIME->create(
header_str => [
From    => 'you@example.com',
To      => 'friend@example.com',
Subject => 'Hai!',
],
attributes => {
encoding => 'quoted-printable',
charset  => 'ISO-7869-1',
},
body_str => "Hai!\n",
);
use Email::Sender::Simple qw(send mail);
send mail($message);

Pre-requisites

• Knowledge of C programming, text editors, and UNIX shell is important to learn Perl language as it helps to do the text manipulation easily.
• Algorithm should be known to the programmer so that he/she can think in the form of algorithms that helps in describing the language.
• Different variable names, looping constructs, dynamic typing, and regular expressions should be known as the standard input or output for the users of Perl.

Target Audience

Web developers use Perl for website management as it is easy to use and has many text editors for text manipulation. Developers who are familiar with shell scripting can start learning Perl as their milestone towards learning programming languages. Also, it is used for the administration of different systems with many platforms.