qw operator

wannabeboy has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: qw operator by brian_d_foy (Abbot) on Feb 24, 2005 at 10:01 UTC
The quote words operator is just a typing convenience to let you omit the commas and quoting. Instead of typing: `@array = ( "dog", "cat", "bird" );` [download] You type: `@array = qw( dog cat bird );` [download] The qw() will break up the thing inside it and give you back a list of the things between the whitespace (and because of that, you can't use qw() with values that have whitespace in them. That's it. -- brian d foy <bdfoy@cpan.org>	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: qw operator by gopalr (Priest) on Feb 24, 2005 at 10:14 UTC
`qw` stands for "quoted words" or quoted by whitespace The `qw` shortcut makes it easy to generate without typing a lot of extra quote marks `@arr=("fred", "barney", "betty", "wilma", "dino")` [download] same as above, but less typing `@arr=qw/ fred barney betty wilma dino /` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: qw operator by lamp (Chaplain) on Feb 24, 2005 at 10:12 UTC
Please go through qwSTRING documentation for more information. --Binoj	[reply]
Re^2: qw operator by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Feb 24, 2005 at 18:39 UTC
And when that link doesn't work, see What's wrong with perldoc.com?. And then maybe look at perldoc perlop section on quote operators. Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply]
Re: qw operator by Anonymous Monk on Feb 24, 2005 at 11:42 UTC
`qw` is not really an operator, as it does all its work at compile time, and doesn't take an expression as argument, but only literal. Anyway, `qw{some string here};` [download] is more or less equivalent to: `warn "Possible attempt to put comments in qw() list" if q{some string here} =~ /#/ if $^W; warn "Possible attempt to separate words with commas" if q{some string here} =~ /,/ if $^W; split(' ', q{some string here});` [download] but then done at compile time.	[reply] [d/l] [select]