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What are special literals in Perl 5.3.4?
Hammad Nasir
Special Literals in Perl are literals that represent different information about the source code. Following are the special literals in Perl:
| Special Literal | Description |
|---|---|
__LINE__ |
Contains the current line number. |
__FILE__ |
Contains the name of the file. |
__END__ |
Is used to denote the end of the code. |
__DATA__ |
Is used to represent a special file-handle. |
__PACKAGE__ |
Contains the name of the current package. By default, the value is main. |
Code
The following code presents an example that uses Special Literals:
print "Name of package: ", __PACKAGE__, "\n"; print "Name of file: ", __FILE__, "\n"; print "Line number: ", __LINE__, "\n";
Explanation
In the example above, three special literals are used. The first literal __PACKAGE__ displays main since we didn’t specify the package’s name. Therefore the default name main is used. The second literal __FILE__ outputs the file’s name main.perl. The last literal, __LINE__ displays the line number on which this literal is used. In this case, it is 3. Therefore it is output on the console.
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