Learning Perl 6

Chapter 4. Strings

Strings represent the text data in your program as Str objects. Perl 6’s facility with text data and its manipulation is one of its major attractions. This chapter focuses on the many ways that you can create Strs; for any job you have there’s likely a feature that makes that easy for you. Along with that you’ll see a bit about inspecting, extracting, and comparing text in preparation for loftier goals coming up.

Literal Quoting

You can type literal text directly into your program. What you type is what the text is, and the compiler does not interpret it as anything other than exactly what you typed. You can surround literal text with half-width corner brackets, ｢ and ｣:

｢Literal string｣

This is your first encounter with a paired delimiter. These characters mark the beginning and end of the Str. There’s an opening character and a closing character that surround your text.

Any character that you use is interpreted as exactly what it is, with no special processing:

｢Literal '" string with \ and {} and /｣

You can’t use only one of the delimiter characters in the Str. These won’t work:

｢ Unpaired ｢ Delimiters ｣
｢ Unpaired ｣ Delimiters ｣

However, if you pair delimiters in the text the compiler will figure out if they are balanced—the opening delimiter comes first and a closing delimiter pairs with it:

｢ Del｢i｣miters ｣

Note

The Perl 6 language is a collection of sublanguages, or slangs. Once inside a particular slang the compiler parses your source code by that slang’s rules. The ...