Support perl during October's Hacktoberfest. Running for the last nine years, this annual event is contributed to by thousands of coders and non coders world wide. However small or large, your input will make a difference.

Take a look at the Hacktoberfest website and get involved. You can also read about it on the Perl Blogs site.

Khawar Latif presented the findings of his Google Season of Docs perl documentation audit at the IEEE ProComm 2022 and the conference paper, Documentation in Open-Source Organizations: Content Audit and Gap Analysis for Perl, is now published at IEEExplore.

Khawar said: “Thanks to Jason McIntosh, Makoto Nozaki and Dan Book for their support, and everyone who helped with the project. I hope this helps Perl and Open Source organizations in general.”

TPF has launched an online store with Perl merchandise (swag) celebrating the Perl 5.36 release. The marketing committee plan to do a custom celebratory collection for each release of Perl with revenue from each sale going to TPF's Perl fund.

The store includes long- and short-sleeved t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and stickers - all featuring a new Raptor image for the 5.36 release.

Please share the link via your socials! https://the-perl-store.creator-spring.com/

Japan Perl Association (JPA) came up with an innovative idea to raise money for The Perl Foundation from their annual event, YAPC::Japan.

To promote the online 2022 YAPC::Japan conference, the organizers chose to donate to TPF 5 yen per tweet that included #yapcjapan, and 300 yen per blog. Contributors raised 15,630 yen (just over US$100). What a great way to raise money and also to raise awareness of their event.

We understand JPA is planning an in person conference in Kyoto March 2023. Watch this space.

Thank you Japan Perl Association!

Tony writes:

``` [Hours] [Activity] 2022/08/01 Monday 0.17 #20005 review fixes 1.45 #19943 review, try to break and approve 0.72 #20008 review

3.51

2022/08/02 Tuesday 1.18 #19964 more ppport 1.33 #19964 more ppport 1.22 #19888 look at CI testing upstream blead modules on old

3.73

2022/08/03 Wednesday 2.52 #19888 more module CI testing 1.85 #19888 more module CI testing, try to test with threaded

4.37

2022/08/04 Thursday 1.23 #19931 research

2.60

2022/08/08 Monday 0.93 #19946 research and comment 0.20 #200…

We received no grant proposals for Perl or Raku in time for the September voting round. The next round of voting will be held starting in early November.

But... there's no need to wait until then. We accept grant proposals all year round. To apply, please read How to Write a Proposal, GC Charter, Rules of Operation and Running Grants List will also help you understand how the grant process works. We also got some grant ideas from the community.

To have a secure SMTP delivery, use Email::Sender. Mail::Sendmail uses SMTP for transport and there's no other type of transport. It does not support SMTP authentication, which my SMTP server now requires even for access from localhost. From what I read and tried once or twice in the past, the current "best practice" or recommended way is to use Email::Sender. Here's an incantation to send mail using sendmail:

use Email::Sender::Simple qw(sendmail);
use Email::Simple;
use Email::Sender::Transport::Sendmail qw();
use Try::Tiny;my $email = Email::Simple->create(
 header=>[To=>$to, From=>…

These are some answers to the Week 184 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days from now (on Oct. 2, 2022 at 23:59). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

You are given list of strings in the format aa9999 i.e. first 2 characters can be anything ‘a-z’ followed by 4 digits ‘0-9’.

Write a script to replace the first two characters with sequence starting with ‘00’, ‘01’, ‘02’ etc.

Example 1

Input…

These are some answers to the Week 183 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

You are given list of arrayrefs.

Write a script to remove the duplicate arrayrefs from the given list.

Example 1

Input: @list = ([1,2], [3,4], [5,6], [1,2])
Output: ([1,2], [3,4], [5,6])

Example 2

Input: @list = ([9,1], [3,7], [2,5], [2,5])
Output: ([9, 1], [3,7], [2,5])

The Raku solution is essentially a one-liner (more than one line because of the tests). We convert the sub-arrays into strings and use the unique built-in routine to remove duplicates.

for ([1,2…

Kephra, an editor for programming (mostly Perl) written in WxPerl is my main project since I stumbled into the Perl community. Most people I know already heard of it - but I want to write about a new development that might be helpful for some, which might consider to use it even if it has a very limited feature set (forth rewrite baby!).

It was silent for some time - because being my main project - I tried to cram all my other ideas, mainly KBOS into it which bogged progress down. Maybe there will be an Object System just for Kephra, solving some issues I saw nowhere else dressed. But for now I…

TPF has launched an online store with Perl merchandise (swag) celebrating the Perl 5.36 release. The marketing committee plan to do a custom celebratory collection for each release of Perl with revenue from each sale goes to TPF's Perl fund.

The store includes long- and short-sleeved t-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies and stickers - all featuring a new Raptor image for the 5.36 release.

From: https://news.perlfoundation.org/post/tpf-merch-store

All this talk about types, objects, and systems, got me to thinking, "what would it take to create a 100% backwards-compatible pure Perl proof-of-concept for optionally typable subroutine signatures". I mean really, how hard could it be? So I started sketching out some ideas and here's what I came up with:

use typing;

sub greet :Function(string, number) :Return() {
  my ($name, $count) = &_;

  print "Hi $name, you have $count messages waiting ...\n";
}

This final sketch felt very Perlish and I had an inkling that I might be able to tie all the concepts being u…

Hi there!

Happy New Year - Shana Tova - to all the Jews around the world!

A couple of days ago Ed Freyfogle wrote us pointig to their post on sponsoring MetaCPAN. I love this on so many levels. First of all, of course the fact that they sponsor some Perl-related activity. They also blog about it. They also send us a heads up to be included here in the Perl Weekly. I hope many more small and large companies, and also individuals will follow them.

Dean Hamstead also sent us an email linking to the new Perl Store, that was also announced on The Perl Foundation blog. Buying a T-shirt or some other sw…

Hi there,

Few months ago, there was a blog post Why Perl is still relevant in 2022 created a lot of noise among the Perl community. The author clearly missed the point. If you check the comments section, you can see how, White Camel Awardee, Dave Cross and few others responed to the post.

I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that Dave came up with perfect response to the other blog post with this This is not your grandfather’s Perl. It has already created positive noise. If you want to take a closer look at the recent changes to the latest release of Perl v5.36 then please do checkout the…

Hi there!

People often tell me that they don't know what to write about or that they are too new to Perl to blog about anything. Let's see.

Last week I posted this article about ANSI command line colors with Perl. It hardly has anything to do with Perl, but I needed it and it can be a useful to others as well. Actually it originated from a discussion I had with my son who is using Python. So first I wrote the article ANSI colors using Python and only after that I converted it to Perl.

It did not require any deep knowledge, definitely not that of Python or Perl.

So if you would like to try writing…

Hi there,

Good luck to all parents with school going kids in England, as today is the day one after a long summer vacation. I am one of them, fortunately or unfortunately. Be strong and you will get through this phase of life too.

Parents are the best mentor for their kids, in my humble opinion. During my early days, I didn't know the importance of mentor. Having met some great mentor in real life in the recent times, I can say it is great service. In 2018, I gave a short talk on The power of mentoring, at London Perl Workshop. A work colleague who does mentoring as part of his role, is by far t…

Hi there!

Last time I mentioned the numbers I collect with the number of visitors to CPAN and I was wondering about the increased activity starting in August 2011. I got a few comments in email and some on Reddit.

Probably the best explanation is what I received from Neil Bowers:

Have a look at the CPAN report I did in February. If you look at the new user signups, you'll see a jump in 2012, and also looking at that chart you'll see that 2012, 2013, and 2014 seem to buck a trend.

In 2012 Intermediate Perl was released, which told the reader to sign up for a PAUSE account and release a test module…

Hi there,

Belated Happy Independence Day to all fellow Indians. We celebrated 75th Anniversary of Independence on 15th August, a proud moment for all of us.

Ever since the release of Perl v5.36, everyone is looking forward to the next big thing in the pipeline, Corinna. I am sure, you don't need an introduction but if you do then you can take a look at this official documentation. Curtis Poe recently shared the latest update about the Corinna (MVP) as accepted by The Perl Steering Committee as detailed in the document.

Do you follow the latest release to CPAN on MetaCPAN?

I noticed one particular…

A lock can serve many purposes in regards to avoiding race conditions. In this article we will explore how to implement a lock using Perl's built-in File::Temp module.

usage: duckduckperl [retrieve] [print]

#!/usr…

Challenge, My solutions

Back after a short break :)

You are given list of arrayrefs.

Write a script to remove the duplicate arrayrefs from the given list.

The logic in the Python and Perl solutions is basically the same. For each item in the outer list, see if it has appeared earlier in the list. In Python comparing two lists works as expected. I don't believe there is a way to do this in Perl, so I wrote an function called same_array to see if two arrays are the same.

$ ./ch-1.py "[[1,2], [3,4], [5,6], [1,2]]"
[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6…

All this talk about types, objects, and systems, got me to thinking, "what would it take to create a 100% backwards-compatible pure Perl proof-of-concept for optionally typable subroutine signatures". I mean really, how hard could it be? So I started sketching out some ideas and here's what I came up with:

use typing;

sub greet :Function(string, number) :Return() {
  my ($name, $count) = &_;

  print "Hi $name, you have $count messages waiting ...\n";
}

This final sketch felt very Perlish and I had an inkling that I might be able to tie all the concepts being u…

Class::Plain was released at 2022-09-22.

use Class::Plain;

class Point {
  field x;
  field y;

  method new : common {
    my $self = $class->SUPER::new(@_);

    $self->{x} //= 0;
    $self->{y} //= 0;

    return $self;
  }

  method move {
    my ($x, $y) = @_;

    $self->{x} += $x;
    $self->{y} += $y;
  }

  method describe {
    print "A point at ($self->{x}, $self->{y})\n";
  }
}

my $point = Point->new(x => 5, y => 10);
$point->describe;

Inheritance:

class Point3D : isa(Point) {
  field z;

  method new : common {
    my $self = $class->SUPER::new…

Naming your subroutine arguments has benefits around increasing the readability of your code. Lets look at an example of code that can benefit from named arguments:

sub safe_open {

    my $file = shift @_;
    my $mode = shift @_;
    my $die_on_failure = shift @_;

    my $success = open(my $fh, $mode, $file);

    if ((not $success) and $die_on_failure) {
        die "error: failed to open '$file': $!\n";
    }

    return $fh;
}

In the following examples we can see that the third argument allows us to control if we should kill the program if the file cannot be opened:

my $fh = safe_open('/fi…

Perl isn't a strongly typed language, and its built-in types are limited and not generally accessible to the engineer, however, Perl supports various classes of data and in recent years has flirted with various ways of enabling runtime type checking.

In a strongly typed language the tl;dr; case for declaring data types is memory management, compile-time code optimization, and correctness. To this day I'm both impressed and horrified by the number of errors caught when I implement some kind of type checking in my programs. When it comes to runtime type checking we're only conce…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given a list of integers. Write a script to find the index of the first biggest number in the list.

use v5.36; 
use strict;
use warnings;

sub index_biggest{
    my(@numbers) = @_;
    my @sorted = sort {$b <=> $a} @numbers; 
    map { return $_ if $numbers[$_] == $sorted[0] } 0 .. @numbers - 1; 
}

MAIN:{
    my @n;
    @n = (5, 2, 9, 1, 7, 6);
    print index_biggest(@n) . "\n";  
    @n = (4, 2, 3, 1, 5, 0);  
    print index_biggest(@n) . "\n";  
}

…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given a paragraph. Write a script to order each sentence alphanumerically and print the whole paragraph.

use v5.36;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub sort_paragraph{
    my($paragraph) = @_;
    my @sentences = split(/\./, $paragraph); 
    for(my $i = 0; $i < @sentences; $i++){
        $sentences[$i] = join(" ", sort {uc($a) cmp uc($b)} split(/\s/, $sentences[$i]));
    }
    return join(".", @sentences);
}

MAIN:{
    my $paragraph = do{
        local $/;
        <…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given a string, $s. Write a script to find out the first unique character in the given string and print its index (0-based).

use v5.36;
use strict;
use warnings;

sub index_first_unique{
    my($s) = @_;
    my @s = split(//, $s);
    map {my $i = $_; my $c = $s[$i]; return $_ if 1 == grep {$c eq $_ } @s } 0 .. @s - 1;
}

MAIN:{
    say index_first_unique(q/Perl Weekly Challenge/);
    say index_first_unique(q/Long Live Perl/);
}

$ perl perl/ch-1.pl
0
1

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

You are given a positive number, $n. Write a script to validate the given number against the included check digit.

use strict;
use warnings;
use boolean;

my @damm_matrix;
$damm_matrix[0] = [0, 7, 4, 1, 6, 3, 5, 8, 9, 2];
$damm_matrix[1] = [3, 0, 2, 7, 1, 6, 8, 9, 4, 5];
$damm_matrix[2] = [1, 9, 0, 5, 2, 7, 6, 4, 3, 8];
$damm_matrix[3] = [7, 2, 6, 0, 3, 4, 9, 5, 8, 1];
$damm_matrix[4] = [5, 1, 8, 9, 0, 2, 7, 3, 6, 4];
$damm_matrix[5] = [9, 5 ,7, 8, 4, 0, 2, 6, 1, 3];
$damm…

The examples used here are from the weekly challenge problem statement and demonstrate the working solution.

Write a script to find the smallest integer x such that x, 2x, 3x, 4x, 5x and 6x are permuted multiples of each other.

use strict;
use warnings;
use boolean;

sub is_permuted{
    my($x, $y) = @_;
    my(@x, @y); 
    map {$x[$_]++} split(//, $x);
    map {$y[$_]++} split(//, $y);
    return false if $#x != $#y;
    my @matched = grep {(!$x[$_] && !$y[$_]) || ($x[$_] && $y[$_] && $x[$_] == $y[$_])} 0 .. @y - 1;
    return true if @matched == @x;
    return false;
}

sub sma…

1. Alien::Build - Build external dependencies for use in CPAN
   • Version: 2.70 on 2022-09-23
   • Votes: 22
   • Previous version: 2.68 was 18 days before
2. App::lcpan - Manage your local CPAN mirror
   • Version: 1.071 on 2022-09-19
   • Votes: 14
   • Previous version: 1.070 was 4 months, 10 days before
3. App::Netdisco - An open source web-based network management tool.
   • Version: 2.057001 on 2022-09-24
   • Votes: 14
   • Previous version: 2.055001 was 22 days before
4. DateTime::TimeZone - Time zone object base class and…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 34

This week there isn't any remarkable distribution

Build date: 2022/09/24 21:01:22 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• App::pwhich - Perl-only `which`
• Keyword::Pluggable - define new keywords in pure Perl
• Net::HAProxy - control HAProxy through a socket

Increasing its reputation:

• app::paperback (+1=3)
• Carmel (+1=25)
• DateTime::Format::Natural (+1=17)
• DBIx::Mint (+1=6)
• Digest (+1=10)
• Digest::MD5 (+1=29)
• Digest::SHA (+1=24)
• Faster::Maths (+1=5)
• File::Which (+1=25)
• FindBin (+1=3)
• Firefox::Marionette (+1=14)
• Future::AsyncAwait (+1=43)
• GD (+1=26)
• Git::CPAN…

These are the five most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2022-09-24 20:59:55 GMT

1. cross-platform techniques to determine screen dimensions - [3/2]
2. How to detect XSS Reflect with Perl - [3/1]
3. Perl regex capture each character as one group - [2/3]
4. Perl :: Translate String "yyyy.mm.dd.hh.mm.ss" into DateTime object? - [2/2]
5. How can I regexp capture the string between 2 specific sets of double underscores? - [2/2]

1. Devel::IPerl - Perl language kernel for Jupyter
   • Version: 0.012 on 2022-09-14
   • Votes: 21
   • Previous version: 0.011 was 8 months, 21 days before
2. Exporter::Tiny - an exporter with the features of Sub::Exporter but only core dependencies
   • Version: 1.004002 on 2022-09-16
   • Votes: 21
   • Previous version: 1.004001 was 7 days before
3. HTTP::BrowserDetect - Determine Web browser, version, and platform from an HTTP user agent string
   • Version: 3.37 on 2022-09-15
   • Votes: 22
   • Previous version: 3.36 was…

This is the weekly favourites list of CPAN distributions. Votes count: 33

Week's winner: app::paperback (+2)

Build date: 2022/09/17 20:19:14 GMT

Clicked for first time:

• Acme::Inabajun::Utils - The great new Acme::Inabajun::Utils!
• Alien::Libtensorflow - Alien for Libtensorflow machine learning library C API
• App::bookmarks - Export browser bookmarks as plain text.
• App::Greple::subst - Greple module for text search and substitution
• App::Greple::update - Greple module to update file content
• App::GUI::Harmonograph - sculpting beautiful circular drawings
• Mojo::Darkpan - A Mojolicious web service frontend leve…

These are the five most rated questions at Stack Overflow last week.
Between brackets: [question score / answers count]
Build date: 2022-09-17 20:17:22 GMT

1. Is anything inside the string changed after binding operations? - [4/1]
2. Parsing time stamps and calculating difference - [3/2]
3. How do I call a named parameter Python function from Perl? - [2/3]
4. Perl :: Accessing Members of an Object with `use strict` Set? - [2/2]
5. Read from process before write with open3 in perl - [2/1]