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Updated: Wednesday, July 27, 2022
 
 

English (3)

Name

English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation variables

Synopsis

use English;
use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;  # Avoids regex performance
# penalty in perl 5.18 and
# earlier
...
if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }

Description

Perl Programmers Reference Guide                                    English(3)



NAME
       English - use nice English (or awk) names for ugly punctuation
       variables

SYNOPSIS
           use English;
           use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;  # Avoids regex performance
                                               # penalty in perl 5.18 and
                                               # earlier
           ...
           if ($ERRNO =~ /denied/) { ... }

DESCRIPTION
       This module provides aliases for the built-in variables whose names no
       one seems to like to read.  Variables with side-effects which get
       triggered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.

       For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short
       English alternatives are provided.  For example, the $/ variable can be
       referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the
       English module.

       See perlvar for a complete list of these.

PERFORMANCE
       NOTE: This was fixed in perl 5.20.  Mentioning these three variables no
       longer makes a speed difference.  This section still applies if your
       code is to run on perl 5.18 or earlier.

       This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular
       expressions, due to unfortunate implementation details.  If performance
       matters in your application and you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or
       $POSTMATCH, try doing

          use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;

       .  It is especially important to do this in modules to avoid penalizing
       all applications which use them.



ATTRIBUTES
       See attributes(7) for descriptions of the following attributes:


       +---------------+-----------------------+
       |ATTRIBUTE TYPE |   ATTRIBUTE VALUE     |
       +---------------+-----------------------+
       |Availability   | runtime/perl-532      |
       +---------------+-----------------------+
       |Stability      | Pass-through volatile |
       +---------------+-----------------------+

NOTES
       Source code for open source software components in Oracle Solaris can
       be found at https://www.oracle.com/downloads/opensource/solaris-source-
       code-downloads.html.

       This software was built from source available at
       https://github.com/oracle/solaris-userland.  The original community
       source was downloaded from
       http://www.cpan.org/src/5.0/perl-5.32.0.tar.gz.

       Further information about this software can be found on the open source
       community website at https://www.perl.org/.



perl v5.32.0                      2020-06-14                        English(3)