The $_ Special Variable

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

Hello everyone, I'm a very new user to perl, and naturally I have a very newbie question.. How does the special variable, ?_ work? I don't understand how it stores information, how you get it to store information, and what it stores exactly. In the tutorial I'm using, the following is all I have to go on in terms of ?_

We could use a conditional as
if ($sentence =~ /under/)
{
    print "We're talking about rugby\n";
}
which would print out a message if we had either of the following
$sentence = "Up and under";
$sentence = "Best winkles in Sunderland";
But it's often much easier if we assign the sentence to the special va
+riable $_ which is of course a scalar. If we do this then we can avoi
+d using the match and non-match operators and the above can be writte
+n simply as
if (/under/)
{
    print "We're talking about rugby\n";
}
The $_ variable is the default for many Perl operations and tends to b
+e used very heavily.
[download]

How does the new regular expression (if (/under/) know what to grab from? Is it just the most recent object that was defined? I apologize for (probably) asking such a silly question. I feel like I'm missing something very obvious and fundamental. Thank you in advance for any help you can give.

Comment on The $_ Special Variable Download Code

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Re: The $_ Special Variable by wind (Priest) on Jun 21, 2011 at 17:46 UTC
In that instance, $_ could be anything. But you can assign directly to $_ to let m// use it as default instead. `$_= "Best winkles in Sunderland"; if (/under/) { print "We're talking about rugby\n"; }` [download] The more common use of $_ is when it's the default iterator in a for loop, or in a while loop when reading from a file. `# Instead of having for my $iter, for uses $_ as the iterator below: for ("Up and under", "Best winkles in Sunderland") { if (/under/) { print "We're talking about rugby\n"; } }` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: The $_ Special Variable by chuloon (Initiate) on Jun 21, 2011 at 17:52 UTC
So the ?_ variable is more or less the same as any other variable? What you just did seemed as though you were just renaming something, i.e. $sentence to ?_ Is that wrong and it's doing something more?	[reply]
Re^3: The $_ Special Variable by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 21, 2011 at 17:57 UTC
So the $_ variable is more or less the same as any other variable? Yes, there's nothing inherently special about it. It's simply the variable many ops use if no alternate is specified. — Like other punctuation variables, it transcends packages. That's a bit special, but it's not all that relevant in practice.	[reply]
Re^3: The $_ Special Variable by wind (Priest) on Jun 21, 2011 at 17:58 UTC
$_ is just a special global variable as defined in perlvar. It is used as the default input for a lot of builtin functions when nothing else is defined. But yes, it can be thought of as just any other variable, just one that is declared automatically by perl to enable you to write tighter code when you want to.	[reply]
Re^4: The $_ Special Variable by chuloon (Initiate) on Jun 21, 2011 at 18:03 UTC
Re^5: The $_ Special Variable by wind (Priest) on Jun 21, 2011 at 18:20 UTC
Some notes below your chosen depth have not been shown here
Re: The $_ Special Variable by jwkrahn (Abbot) on Jun 21, 2011 at 21:52 UTC
`If we do this then we can avoid using the match and non-match operator +s and the above can +be written simply as if (/under/) { print "We're talking about rugby\n"; }` [download] The statement above is incorrect. `/under/` is the match operator. The missing operator there is the binding operator. And there is no such thing as a "non-match" operator.	[reply] [d/l] [select]