Chapter 10. Operators and Precedence

Perl operators have the following associativity and precedence, listed from highest precedence to lowest. Table cells indicate groups of operators of equal precedence.

Assoc.

Operators

Description

right

terms and list operators

See below.

left

->

Infix dereference operator.

none

++

Auto-increment (magical on strings).

 

--

Auto-decrement.

right

**

Exponentiation.

right

\

Reference to an object (unary).

right

! ~

Unary negation, bitwise complement.

right

+ –

Unary plus, minus.

left

=~

Binds a scalar expression to a pattern match.

left

!~

Same, but negates the result.

left

* / % x

Multiplication, division, modulo, repetition.

left

+ – .

Addition, subtraction, concatenation.

left

>> <<

Bitwise shift right, bitwise shift left.

right

named unary operators

E.g., sin, chdir, -f, -M.

none

< > <= >=

lt gt le ge

Numerical relational operators.

String relational operators.

none

== != <=>

Numerical equal, not equal, compare.

 

eq ne cmp

Stringwise equal, not equal, compare. Compare operators return –1 (less), 0 (equal), or 1 (greater).

left

&

Bitwise AND.

left

| ^

Bitwise OR, exclusive OR.

left

&&

Logical AND.

left

||

Logical OR.

none

..

Range operator.

 

...

Alternative range operator.

right

?:

if ? then : else operator.

right

= += -= etc.

Assignment operators.

left

,

Comma operator, also list element separator.

left

=>

Same, enforces the left operand to be a string.

right

list operators (rightward)

See below.

right

not

Low precedence logical NOT.

left

and

Low precedence logical AND.

left

or

Low precedence logical OR.

left

xor

Low precedence ...

Get Perl Pocket Reference, 4th Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.