Introduction to Perl
programming
Perl history
Practical Extraction and Report Language
developed by Larry Wall in year1987
Developed as a general-purpose Unix
scripting language to make report processing
easier.
It has undergone many changes and
revisions and become widely popular
amongst programmers.
Latest Perl version is _____
Larr y
Operators
Operators are special symbols or words
that describe an operation or an action to
take place between two or more values.
Operators are used in formulas.
The program reads the operators in a
formula and performs the actions specified.
Arithmetic operators
Simple operators of interest: + , - , * , /
Respectively adds, subtracts, multiplies and
divides two floating point numbers.
a ** b
Raises "a" to the power of "b". Works on
floating point numbers too.
a.b
Concatenates two strings.
a%b
Returns the remainder of "b" from "a".
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Variables
Variables hold variable pieces of information they are just storage containers for numbers,
strings, and compound structures
Variables do not need to be declared
Data type (int, char, ...) is decided at run time
Three major types of variables in Perl are,
o
o
o
Scalar
Array
Hash
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Scalar
A scalar holds numbers and strings,
Scalar variable name starts with $ and
Example
$a = 5;
$language = perl;
length function - function returns the length,
in characters, of the supplied string.
Example
print length($language); #output 4
Simple example
Write a program to print Hello World.
print Hello World;
OR
$string= Hello World;
print $string;
OR
Take input from user
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Case modification in string
The four basic functions are,
lc
uc
lcfirst
ucfirst
Example
$string = "The Cat Sat on the Mat";
Array
An ordered collection of scalars
Array variable is denoted by the @
Example
@char = ( Rancho, Farhan, Raju );
To access whole array,
print @char; # prints : Rancho Farhan Raju
*Notice that you do not need to loop
through the whole array to print it.
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Array Index
Array Indexes start at 0 !!!
To access one element of the array : use $
Why? Because every element in the array
is scalar
Example
@char = ( Rancho, Farhan, Raju );
print $char[0]\n; # prints : Rancho
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Array index
To find the index of the last element in the
array,
@array = ( Rancho, Farhan, Raju );
print $#array; #output 2
Array size
To find the number of elements in the array:
$array_size = @array;
$array_size now has 3 in the above
example
because there are 3 elements in the array
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split and join functions
split function- Explodes strings into arrays
$my_dna= "atgggaccatgcgatttagctcg";
@dna= split('',$my_dna);
print "@dna";
join function- Explodes arrays into scalars
@char= (Rancho, Farhan, Raju);
$names= join('',@char);
print $names;
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Built-in functions of arrays
pop- removes last an element of an array
$char= pop(@char);
push- adds an element at the end of an array
push(@char, joe);
shift- removes first an element of an array
$char= shift(@char);
unshift- adds an element at the beginning of
an array
unshift(@char, $char);
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Lets write simple
Perl programs
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Write Perl code for following
1.
To take input from user and print the
same.
2.
To print addition of two numbers entered
by user.
3.
To transcribe DNA into RNA.
4.
To open a text file and print file content.
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1. Take input from user and
print the same.
print Enter text:;
chomp ($text= <STDIN>);
print You Entered-\t $text;
exit;
Output
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2. Addition of two numbers
print "Enter first number:";
chomp ($fnum= <STDIN>);
print "Enter second number:";
chomp ($snum= <STDIN>);
$ans= $fnum + $snum;
print "Addition of two numbers $fnum & $snum
is $ans";
Output
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3. Transcribing DNA to RNA
$DNA= "atgggctctccat";
$RNA= $DNA;
$RNA=~s/t/u/g;
print "Here is RNA\n";
print "$RNA";
exit;
Output
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4. Program to open a text file
and print file content
$filename= myfile.txt';
open(FH, $filename);
@cont= <FH>;
close FH;
print @cont;
exit;
Output
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Hashes
Also known as associative arrays
Hash names start with a %
a list of key/value pairs.
Example
%months = ('January' => 31,
...
'November' => 30,
'December' => 31);
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Hashes- keys & values
Now all we need to do when we want to
know how many days are in November is
access the value in the %months hash
with a key of November:
print "Days in
November:",$months{'November'},"\n";
#Output November: 31
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Write a program to find unique entries in
array.
@fruits=(banana, mango, apple, orange,
cherry,
mango, grapes,
orange);
%basket=();
foreach(@fruits)
{
$basket {$_}=1;
}
@unique= keys %basket;
#output
mango
print
@unique;
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Resources For Perl
Books:
Learning Perl
By Rancho Wall
Published by O'Reilly
Programming Perl
By Rancho Wall, Tom Christiansen and Jon Orwant
Published by O'Reilly
Beginning Perl for Bioinformatics
By James D. Tisdall
The Complete Reference Perl
By Martin Brown
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Web Sources for Perl
Web
www.perl.com
www.perldoc.org
www.perl.org
www.perlmonks.org
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Questions???
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