CJKV Information Processing, 2nd Edition

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Chapter 9: Information Processing Techniques

Perl

Usually described as a scripting language, Perl, developed by Larry Wall, is much, much

more than that. Perl’s main strengths include rapid development, regular expressions (de-

scribed later in this chapter),

*

and hashes (associative arrays). It is not so much these

individual features that provide Perl with extraordinary text-manipulation capabilities,

but rather how these features are intertwined with one another. Other programming lan-

guages oer similar features, but there is oen no convenient way for them to function

together. In Perl, for example, a regular expression can be used to parse text, and at the

same time it can be used to store the resulting items into a hash for subsequent lookup.

Perl has been the programming language of choice for those who write CGI programs or

do other web-related programming (a topic that is discussed in Chapter 12), because it is

well-suited for the task.

e extent to which Perl has become Unicode-enabled is now well-documented.

†

How-

ever, it is strongly advised that the excellent Perl Unicode Tutorial be read before exploring

that documentation.

‡

A lot of the Unicode-enabled portions are exposed when you use

the Encode module, such as including the following in your Perl program:

use Encode;

Be sure to read the documentation for the Encode module for more information about its