Another thing to keep in mind is that you must use a backslash to print a $ symbol. Without it, Perl will try to interpret it as a variable. Behold:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "I have $15.00 in my pocket boyee!";

If you try to run that program you will get an odd result:

  I have .00 in my pocket boyee!

Very odd indeed. Since we aren't trying to print a variable, the proper way to write this code would be:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "I have \$15.00 in my pocket boyee!";

Which would give us the correct print out of:

  I have $15.00 in my pocket boyee!

Similarly, you cannot print out an @ symbol either. The following will not work:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "My email address is james@james.com.";

If you used this code it would print:

  My email address is james.com.

To fix this, we again use our good old buddy the backslash:

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "My email address is james\@james.com.";

Which prints out:

  My email address is james@james.com .

And lastly, we can also use escape characters and special characters on our variables. Here is an example:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$color="black";

$number="eight";

print "\n\nPlease find my favorite color and number below:\n\n";

print "\tMy favorite color:\t\t\t$color\n";

print "\tMy favorite number is:\t\t\t$number\n\n";

This will print out our text and variables so that they appear like this on the user's screen:

  Please find my favorite color and number below"

  My favorite color:               black

  My favorite number is:       eight

Well that's all the time we have for this exciting episode. Join us next time when we continue this intriguing, gut wrenching discussion on Perl text manipulation. I look forward to seeing you.

Till then...