You've (accidentally) stumbled upon a new (5.6) feature. Quoting perldoc perldata: ... a literal of the form v1.20.300.4000 is parsed as a string composed of characters with the specified ordinals.

print ".102.111.111 - ", .102.111.111; #prints ".102.111.111 - foo?
[download]

This actually parses as:

print ".102.111.111 - ", v0.102.111.111;
[download]

Since it's a numeric literal with multiple `.'s, it's interpreted as a v-string (there's actually a hidden \0 there as the first character). In your second example, you don't have a literal with more than two dots, so it parses as print ".$num.111.111 - ",. $num . 111.111.

I actually did know about that feature. :) I’d read about it and to experiment, I wanted to print out a table showing the ‘v-string notation, i.e. ‘.102.111.111’, and then the word/symbol that that would result in, i.e. ‘foo’. So I’d have a table like:


=================
v-string | output
=================
 111     |   o
-----------------
 112     |   p
-----------------

etc.

The logical way to achieve this, seemed to be a loop, that printed a line, incremented the count by one, and then printed the next line. This would show me the code and the corresponding letter. However, since I can’t print out .$scalar. I’m not sure how to achieve this...

Thanks again for your time.

It'd be no different than your average run-of-the-mill ASCII chart.

The . operator is used for concatenation, so it might not play nice with your code when it is used with variables. It probably thinks you are trying to concatenate $num with something else.

Try this:

$f=102;
$o=111;
print (chr ($num) . chr ($num2) . chr ($num2));
[download]

-----------------------------------
Washizu
The best offense is a good offense.

Thank you very much. :)

A good debugging tool is -O::Deparse -p. This will tell you where the parentheses are and will fill in the gaps when it passes through the precompiler. Your first statements evaluates as

print '.102.111.111 - ', '0.102111.111';
[download]

First of all, it looks at 102.111.111 as: concatenate (0).102 and 111.111 (which are evaluated as digits). And than will make an array with 2 elements and passes this to print. And your second to

print  ("$num.111.111 - ").$num.111.111 ;
[download]

use strict;
use warnings;

{
local $,=".";  #so you get the . 's
print ".102.111.111 - ",102,111,111;
my $num=102;
print ".$num.111.111 - ",102,111,111;
}
[download]

Added laters: Damned, I must learn to type faster
---------------------------
Dr. Mark Ceulemans
Senior Consultant
IT Masters, Belgium