Although the other answers appear to explain the way this works they ignore one other trick going on here. The ASCII characters between 0 and > inclusive are 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; < = and >. You'll notice that the > character was used in the example code, and not the = charactor, though if you do a one-to-one mapping it looks like = should have been used, and > would be left over. The reason the could given still works is another bit of magic -- when tr's replacement list is shorter then its source list it duplicates the last item of the replacement list to match, thus the Y at the end correspondes to both = and >. Except with some /something options: see perlop for more information, of course.

In reply to Re: Can someone explain this one to me? by wog
in thread Can someone explain this one to me? by Cody Pendant

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