One of the steps of debugging Perl can be to find out what is actually in a string. There are a number of more-or-less informative ways to do this, and I thought I would compare them.

For this I used two short strings. The first was just the concatenation of the characters whose ordinals are 24 through 39; that is, 16 ASCII characters straddling the divide between control characters and printable characters. The second was a small variation on the first, made by removing the last character and appending "\N{U+100}" (a.k.a. "\N…

Time::Piece is a date/time module that replaces the built-in functions gmtime() and localtime(). The replaced functions return a Time::Piece object, with accessors for the compontents of the time. Time::Piece…

The open or die idiom is fairly ubiquitous in Perl. To be useful, the exception should say something about what went wrong: open ... or die "Open error: $!", for example.

The $! built-in variable (a.k.a. $ERRNO or $OS_ERROR if use English; is in effect) gives you access to the C language …