I’ve finished some other book projects (notably Learning Perl 6 and Mojolicious Web
Clients), and it’s time to think about what I need to do to
refresh my other books.
The 7th Edition covers up to v5.24 and now we’re on to v5.30 (with
v5.32 soon). I track interesting new features at The Effective
Perler.
Some notable things to include:
- You must escape literal left braces, {, in regular expressions.
- The /xx match operator flag allows insignificant whitespace in character class.
- Here-docs can strip leading whitespace.
- A hash in scalar context will return the number of keys, not the hash statistics.
- Initialisation of aggregate state variables
- qr’\N{name}’ is now supported
- Script runs in regexes are no longer experimental