I also habitually use s/// where I could use tr///.

The main difference is with s/// you can use regular expressions, while in tr/// you cannot. Also (from the camel book) "the translation table is built at compile time, neither the SEARCHLIST nor the REPLACEMENTLIST are subject to double quote interpolation." So that means:$str =~ tr/$mylist//d; Will delete all occurances of "$, m, y, l, i, s, t" in $str. Probably not what you want.

Also since the tr/// cannot use regex's it is usually a lot faster. I did a benchmark to that here.