One of the most common things you might want to do is calculate Perl string length. For instance, you might ask the user to enter some text and want to make sure that they haven't entered too much or too little. Piece of cake. Just use Perl's length() function.

But that's just scratching the surface of what Perl can do with strings. Being designed from the ground up as a text manipulation language, Perl has a lot of string functions. Try some of these out in our quick and easy guide.

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Unless you know in advance exactly what values your Perl programs are going to deal with, then at some point you're going to need to test one value against another. For instance, you might want to display a simple "Continue? (Y/N)" message to your user. If they enter 'Y' you will perform some processing. If they enter 'N' your program should exit.

Perl uses comparison operators to achieve this. In this simple beginner tutorial Comparing Values in Perl we look at how you compare two values and direct program flow accordingly.

What's that you say? Perl 6 hasn't been released yet?

Well, of course, you're right. Perl creator Larry Wall has been telling people at just about every Perl conference over the last couple of years that Perl 6 will be out "by Christmas". Of course, he never told us which Christmas!

However, some folks just aren't prepared to wait for an official release and want to start playing with Perl 6 straight away. If you're among them, you can access a preview release of Perl 6 called Rakudo Star.

And if you're cutting edge enough to playing with Perl 6 already, why not enter the Perl 6 Coding Contest? There are five tasks to complete:

• Find a way to express an integer as an expression containing four 9s
• List numbers which are sums of cubes in more ways than one
• Calculate addition chains
• Slide a hex-shaped piece across a board
• List all possible trees of a certain type

You'll be judged on the clarity, consistency, brevity and efficiency of your code. If you fancy your chances, find out more at the Strangely Consistent Perl 6 blog.

Image © Larry Wall - used with permission

Ok, so we're focusing on regular expressions over the next couple of weeks. But let's not forget all the other things you can do with Perl strings.

Perl is famous for its ability to parse text. In fact it was designed initially as a text manipulation language. Creator Larry Wall's main objective in creating Perl was to make it simpler for programmers to extract and format text by combining all the things he liked about sed, awk and C. Hence the name: PERL (Practical Extraction and Reporting Language).

Although it wasn't long before developers (particularly web developers and system administrators) harnessed the power and flexibility of Perl for other applications, it remains to this day one of the best languages out there for slicing and dicing text. It handles strings faster and more efficiently than many other languages and has a whole range of functions for comparing, sorting, extracting and manipulating strings. Learning how to work with strings is fundamental to understanding Perl. Check out our basic string manipulation tutorial.

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