Perl is my native programming language and the one I know the best. It was the lingua franca back in the late 90s when I first started web development.

Perl gets knocked around quite a bit these day for not being elegant. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, I’m not knowledgeable enough about programming languages to provide a definitive answer. All I know is it’s useful for me and its the easiest way for me to get things done. And remember that English isn’t a very elegant language either but it got the job done well enough to become the most popular one in the world.

Here are the perl modules I’ve written and contributed. The are of varying quality and usefulness.

Over the last couple of years, I have made a concerted effort to improve my programming quality and skills.

print to stdout

• binmode STDOUT, ":encoding(utf8)";

Regexes

substitute text when not between two strings of text:

• see https://stackoverflow.com
• used in markdown_to_note code:

    $input_text =~ s@(|)(?!(.(?!^{٪\s*highlight))*{٪ endhighlight ٪})@|@ms;
    $input_text =~ s@(|)(?!(.(?!^```\S))*^```})@|@ms;
  

  • above code will not replace | if it is between fenced code markers

Modules

Web::Scraper

• tool for pulling content from scraped web pages
• metacpan page: Web::Scraper - Web Scraping Toolkit using HTML and CSS Selectors or XPath expressions - metacpan.org

Tips

• Always use the Web::Scraper::LibXML
  • works better than HTML::TreeBuilder::XPath

Other notes linking here:

Tech stuff