Duration: 2 Days
Perl allows you to write powerful, flexible, platform-independent scripts that run on your server. Learn to harness Perl's potential for processing text, searching HTML pages and text files, and more.
What You Will Learn
- Understand Perl commands and program structure
- Use regular expressions
- Build a searchable site index
- Search a text file
- Edit text dynamically
Audience
Students that want to develop complex, web-driven applications.
Prerequistes
Course Outline
1. Your Files for Class
- What is a CGI script, and what is Perl?
- What's special about a cgi-bin directory?
2. Perl Syntax
- print statements
- Identifying the Perl interpreter
- The content-type header
- Printing HTML content
- Comments
- Exercise 1: Building a Simple Web Page in Perl
3. Interpreting Variables
- Scalar variables
- Form variables
- Exercise 2: Processing a Form
4. Working with Scalars
- Scalars and arithmetic
- Shortcut operation and sssignment
- Autoincrement (++) and Autodecrement (--)
5. Conditionals
- Testing existence of a variable
- Comparing values
- Combining multiple conditions
- More than just if-else
- Pessimistic tests with unless
- Exercise 3: Testing Form Values with Conditionals
6. Pattern Matching
- Case Sensitivity
- Testing Environment for Regular Expressions
- Some Common Patterns
- Exercise 4: Validating Form Data
7. Pattern Substitution
- Remembering text with Backreferences
- Character translation
- Exercise 5: Substitution and Backreferences
8. Array Variables
- Creating an array
- Individual array elements
- Counting array elements
- Reading one array into several scalars
- Adding array elements with push
- Removing an array element with shift
- Exercise 6: Using Basic Arrays
9. More Array Functions
- Reordering your array with sort and reverse
- Search your array with grep
- Change between array and scalar with join and split
- Exercise 7: Practicing with Array Functions
- A possible solution to Exercise 7
10. Loops
- Looping with while and until
- Looping with for
- Looping with foreach
- Exercise 8: Looping Through Your Array
11. Reading from and Writing to Files
- A simple demonstration
- What these scripts have in common
- Adding text to a file
- Reading lines from a file
- Confirm that the file opened properly
- Using split to parse tab-delimited text files
- Exercise 9: Writing to a Text File
- Exercise 10: Searching in a Text File
12. Listing Files in a Directory
- Filtering file names with grep
13. Introducing Subroutines
- How to write subroutines
- Exercise 11: Building and Calling Subroutines
14. Making Your Subroutine More Reusable
- Passing variables to a subroutine
- Returning results from a subroutine
- Variable scope with my and local
- Exercise 12: Passing Variables to and from Subroutines
15. Hash Variables
- Looping through a hash
- Other hash manipulations
- Environment variables: a ready-made hash
- Another useful loop: all form variables
- Exercise 13: Practicing with Hashes
16. Sending Email
- The mail:mailer module
- Exercise 14: Sending an Email Message
Course Labs
