Don't trust the syntax highlighting in your text editor as an authority on how perl itself will treat a script.

Perl has been proven to be impossible to parse. (If you define "parse" to mean "determine the structure of without executing it". Clearly it is possible to determine the structure of Perl code if you actually execute it.) Text editors do their best, but sometimes fall short.

The editors that tend to do the best highlighting for Perl in my experience are Padre and SciTE. With SciTE, the only Perl syntax that seems to consistently confuse it is:

sub uppercase ($) {
  return uc $_[0];
}

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(Yes, I'm well-aware that this is a useless function. It's just an example.) SciTE will highlight the $) in the prototype as if it were the $) built-in EGID variable.

In reply to Re^3: regex issue by tobyink
in thread regex issue by perlNewby

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