Perl Pocket Reference, 5th Edition

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 next page.
left	->	Infix dereference operator.
none	++	Auto-increment (magical on strings).
	--	Auto-decrement.
right	**	Exponentiation.
right	\	Reference to an object (unary).
right	! ~	Unary logical NOT, bitwise NOT.
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	== != <=> eq ne cmp ~~	Numerical equal, not equal, compare. Stringwise equal, not equal, compare. Smartmatch.
left	&	Bitwise AND.
left	| ^	Bitwise OR, bitwise XOR.
left	&&	Logical AND.
left	|| //	Logical OR, defined OR.
none	..	Range operator.
	...	Alternative range operator.
right	?:	Ternary 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 logical XOR.

Parentheses can be used to group ...