[Omaha.pm] auto-increment magic
Jay Hannah
jay at jays.net
Fri Oct 19 11:50:36 PDT 2007
I'll buy you a beer if you've ever used this, or seen it used usefully
in a real-life program...
j
(... and what is \z?)
perldoc perlop
The auto-increment operator has a little extra builtin
magic to it. If you increment a variable that is numeric,
or that has ever been used in a numeric context, you get a
normal increment. If, however, the variable has been used
in only string contexts since it was set, and has a value
that is not the empty string and matches the pattern
"/^[a-zA-Z]*[0-9]*\z/", the increment is done as a string,
preserving each character within its range, with carry:
print ++($foo = '99'); # prints '100'
print ++($foo = 'a0'); # prints 'a1'
print ++($foo = 'Az'); # prints 'Ba'
print ++($foo = 'zz'); # prints 'aaa'
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