Programming Perl, 4th Edition

“Here” Documents

A line-oriented form of quoting is based on the Unix shell’s here-document syntax. It’s line-oriented in the sense that the delimiters are lines rather than characters. The starting delimiter is the current line, and the terminating delimiter is a line consisting of the string you specify. Following a <<, you specify the string to terminate the quoted material, and all lines following the current line down to but not including the terminating line are part of the string. The terminating string may be either an identifier (a word) or some quoted text. If quoted, the type of quote determines the treatment of the text, just as it does in regular quoting. An unquoted identifier works as though it were in double quotes. A backslashed identifier works as though it were in single quotes (for compatibility with shell syntax). There must be no space between the << and an unquoted identifier, although whitespace is permitted if you specify a quoted string instead of the bare identifier. (If you insert a space, it will be treated as a null identifier, which is valid but deprecated, and matches the first blank line—see the first Hurrah! example below.) The terminating string must appear by itself, unquoted and with no extra whitespace on either side, on the terminating line.

print <<EOF; # same as earlier example The price is $Price. EOF print <<"EOF"; # same as above, with explicit quotes The price is $Price. EOF print <<'EOF'; # single–quoted quote All things (e.g. a camel's ...