The latest version of Perl, 5.26.0, has just been released.

Here's the changes since 5.24.1: perldelta.

I've been using 5.25.9 (developer release) for a while because I wanted the Unicode 9.0 support. This included new features now available in 5.26.0. A couple I particularly liked are:

Indented Here-documents

This allows you to now write (after a couple of levels of indentation): 

{
    ...
    {
        ...
        my $boilerplate = <<~'EOT';
        Boilerplate text ...
        EOT
        ...
    }
    ...
}

[download]

Previously, without being able to add the tilde, meant code typically looked liked this (and the readability gains from indenting code were somewhat diminished): 

{
    ...
    {
        ...
        my $boilerplate = <<'EOT';
Boilerplate text ...
EOT
        ...
    }
    ...
}

[download]
New regular expression modifier /xx

While the '/x' modifier allows whitespace in most of a regex to improve readability, the '/xx' modifier allows whitespace in bracketed character classes also. This can be used to separate ranges and individual characters. As a quickly contrived example to capture the first and last character of strings starting with alphanumerics and ending with certain punctuation characters: 

/^([A-Za-z0-9]).*?([!@#$%^&*])$/
/ ^ ( [A-Za-z0-9] ) .*? ( [!@#$%^&*] ) $ /x
/ ^ ( [ A-Z a-z 0-9] ) .*? ( [ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ] ) $ /xx

[download]

It's been discussed here a few times recently, but also note: Removal of the current directory (".") from @INC

While I was writing this, I was also installing 5.26.0 (under perlbrew). I see it has already completed successfully: so that much works and, at least for me, didn't take very long.

— Ken

In reply to Perl 5.26.0 Available by kcott

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