English

Section: Perl Programmers Reference Guide (3pm)
Updated: 2007-12-18
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NAME

English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables

SYNOPSIS

    use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;  # Avoids regex performance penalty
    use English;
    ...
    if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }

DESCRIPTION

This module provides aliases for the built-in variables whose names no one seems to like to read. Variables with side-effects which get triggered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.

For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short English alternatives are provided. For example, the $/ variable can be referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the English module.

See perlvar for a complete list of these.

PERFORMANCE

This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular expressions, due to unfortunate implementation details. If performance matters in your application and you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or $POSTMATCH, try doing

   use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;

. It is especially important to do this in modules to avoid penalizing all applications which use them.