Tinkering with Perl

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Output

The print statement is useful for output. Let me give an example of a very famous program:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "Hello, world!\n";

The first line is a line you should put at the beginning of every Perl program you write. The second line prints, "Hello, world!" It is the second line we are studying.

What's that funny "\n"? What does it mean? Well, Perl doesn't know by itself when a line should end. So, we put "\n" at the end of each line, to tell it to go to the next line.

Here is another example of some code using print:

print "The average is " . $Average . ".\n";

Now, what does that all mean?

Remember that, earlier, when we talked about scalars, we could concatenate two strings by putting a period ('.') between them. This takes three strings: "The average is ", $Average, and ".\n", and sticks them all together. Let's say that $Average is 4.5. Then the result will look like:

The average is 4.5.

The "." in ".\n" is just a period for the end of the sentence, and "\n" means the end of line.

Tinkering with Perl

Output

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