MeowChow                                   
               s aamecha.s a..a\u$&owag.print

It looks odd, but it is correct behaviour. \ is a meta-character for escaping, but in single quoted strings the only thing it escapes is ' (which allows you to embed a ' in a single quoted string without having to use the q{} syntax, or itself). Nothing else is quotable.

So in the second line, \+, + is not magical, does not have to be quoted, so \ has no effect, is not consumed, and thus \+ is emitted.

In the third line, \\+, \ escapes the following \, so \+ is emitted, and so on for the forth line.

You might want to look at S_scan_str in toke.c for far more than you ever wanted to know about how perl scans strings.

The most straightforward way of writing your code would be to double up each \ you want to print:

perl -e "print join(qq(\n),('+','\\+','\\\\+','\\\\\\+')),qq(\n)"

# or, more concisely

perl -le "print $_ for qw/+ \\+ \\\\+ \\\\\\+ \\\\\\\\+/"
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1. A backslash followed by a delimiter gives just that delimiter.
2. A backslash followed by a backslash gives just a single backslash.

Abigail

I have never found the reason for the first exception to be obvious.

Perl has enough quoting mechanisms that I think it would be more valuable to have one that makes it easy to include a row of backslashes in than it is to have every one able to put out any possible text you could want.

Heck, just the fact that the rules for single-quoting are so widely understood (as can be seen from people wondering at what it does) strongly suggests that something is wrong with the rule as it stands.

Escaping the escape character seems to be used in about any escaping mechanism that I can recall. That's hardly a Perl specific thing. And not being about to escape the delimiter is just very awkward. Do you like stuff like:

    echo '$foo'"'"'$bar'
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just to be able to echo

    $foo'$bar
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like you have to do in many shells?

Abigail

Greetings,

I have, now :) Thanks.
Cheers,
alf

---

You can't have everything: where would you put it?

--
John.

print join("\n",split(/\s+/,<<'END_OF_TEXT');
+ \+ \\+ \\\+
END_OF_TEXT
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+
\+
\\+
\\\+

Updated in respect for Abigail-II

Yves / DeMerphq
---
Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.

The _only_ way? Hah. You don't know Perl (yet) ;-).

If you don't like the way Perl interpolates strings, Perl let's you change them.

Abigail

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings 'all';

use overload;

BEGIN {
    overload::constant q => sub {$_ [$_ [2] && $_ [2] eq 'q' ? 0 : 1]}
+;
}


print '+ \+ \\+ \\\+', "\n";
print "+ \+ \\+ \\\+", "\n";
 
__END__
+ \+ \\+ \\\+
+ + \+ \+
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