It's All About Context  May 2001 Randal's advice: When hacking Perl, get the text right. Don't let a context-sensitive Perl operator land you in jail. Perl Advisor: A MIME Is a Terrible Thing to Waste  April 2001 Using MIME::Tools, Schwartz combats spam by creating a Perl filter that recognizes HTML email and strips the HTML fork. What is That, Anyway? January 2001 Have a directory full of stuff you don't remember? Perl has many built-in operators to help you figure out what it is. So What's the Difference? December 2000 A lot of common programming is dealing with things that change. Things do indeed change, and sometimes we'd like to know how they changed. Little Acts of Magic  October 2000 When it comes to text manipulation, Perl can perform virtual acts of magic. Taint so Easy, Is It?  August 2000 If you've been reading my columns for any length of time, you've probably seen me mention "taint mode", usually briefly while I'm describing a "hash-bang" line of something like: #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw Getting It to Look the Way You Want   May 2000 For the most part, Perl programmers tend to use the nice standby print operator for output, or drift occasionally into the realm of formats to quickly lay out a look for a customized report. However, the often overlooked printf operator provides a nice amount of custom control to get those output strings to look exactly the way you want. Rainy Day Template Fun   March 2000 I grew up (and still reside) in Oregon, well known for having rain nearly all parts of the year. However, the months around April seem to have been particularly wet, and as a child, I'd often end up doing "indoor" activities during the heaviest rainy days.

About Randal : Randal L. Schwartz is a two-decade veteran of the software industry -- skilled in software design, system administration, security, technical writing, and training. He has coauthored the "must-have" standards: Programming Perl, Learning Perl, Learning Perl for Win32 Systems, and Effective Perl Programming, as well as writing regular columns for WebTechniques and Unix Review magazines. He's also a frequent contributor to the Perl newsgroups, and has moderated comp.lang.perl.announce since its inception. His offbeat humor and technical mastery have reached legendary proportions worldwide (but he probably started some of those legends himself). Randal's desire to give back to the Perl community inspired him to help create and provide initial funding for The Perl Institute (perl.org). He is also a founding board member of the Perl Mongers (pm.org), the worldwide association of "Perl users groups". Since 1985, Randal has owned and operated Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc.