Clarification on chomp

Question

I\'m on break from classes right now and decided to spend my time learning Perl. I\'m working with Beginning Perl (http://www.perl.org/books/beginning-perl/) and I\'m finish

Answer 1

reads to the end of the input string, which contains a newline if you press return to enter it, which you probably do.

chomp removes the newline at the end of a string. $/ is a variable (as you found, defaulting to newline) that you probably don't have to worry about; it just tells perl what the 'input record separator' is, which I'm assuming means it defines how far reads. You can pretty much forget about it for now, it seems like an advanced topic. Just pretend chomp chomps off a trailing newline. Honestly, I've never even heard of $/ before.

As for your other question, it is generally cleaner to always chomp variables and add newlines as needed later, because you don't always know if a variable has a newline or not; by always chomping variables you always get the same behavior. There are scenarios where it is unnecessary, but if you're not sure it can't hurt to chomp it.

Hope this helps!