Best Perl Editor and Tools

[rccmum]

Hi All,

I am learning Perl, newbie...

What tools, methods best practices the Perl guys out there use to creat scripts, design perl based solution ( XML, CGI , HTML ) etc..

What is the best perl editor who can get you all stuff required to design a web based solution or other non-web based solutions ?

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Use the CPAN and Perl CORE modules designed specifically for HTML and XML parsing. Web page parsing with regular expressions becomes complex and brittle very quickly. FOr CGI scripts, there is an excellent module too.

For Perl best practices, there is no better (in the opinion of many!) than Damian Conway's "Perl Best Practices" (PBP) book. That applies to good Perl regardless of the web.

An adjunct tool to the PBP book is the 'perltidy' module to standarize your code. Damian's discusses it. Download and install it from CPAN.

As for an editor, use your favorite (vi, vim, emacs).

Regards!

...JRF...

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Emacs which is available for HP-UX has some syntax checkers.

Enhanced VIM for Linux also provides color coded syntax checking.

The open source world has several good perl editors at a good price $0 if you wish to use Linux to edit your source.

SEP

[Hein van den Heuvel]

There are many language sensitive editors out there.

While on windoze I like the crimson editor:
http://www.crimsoneditor.com/

It does the right things for me.
- syntax highlightting
- paranthesis maching
- indenting
- column or line basde cut & paste
- clever file format understanding (windoze vs unix)
- tabs
- free

Enjoy,
Hein.

[Zeev Schultz]

Kdevelop is a nice choice on Linux/KDE - http://www.kdevelop.org/ since it is a multilanguage solution (c,C++,Java,Perl,PHP etc)

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

By the way, if you want a rather large selection of 'vim' color schemes that are syntax-based, this is one place to fetch them:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~maverick/VimColorSchemeTest/index-pl.html

Schemes are available for Perl, HTML, C and Java.

Regards!

...JRF...

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

Whatever you will be using as an editor (probably based on the syntax highlight schemes they support you like), consider using Perl::Tidy - of course with your own set of style rules - to format your code. You'll be consistent.

I tried using emacs, I really tried, but it got me into a constant flow of cursing as it does not support my style/layout, and my style/layout is sacred for me. Every other style is *wrong*, and disables me to maintain my own code. The big advantage of 'vim' over all the other (very good) vi clones (like my favourite 'elvis') is that vim is very actively maintained, and has got a huge user base and support groups, though still based on the great original vi.

"Best' is relative. So is worse. For me emacs is as bad to programming as bad is U2 to music. I'm sure many amongst you will reverse both statements. Not that I would understabd it :)

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

[rccmum]

Thanks a lot to all of you for responding in here. The replies are very useful and I do appreciate all.

I will try out all suggested. Actually I saw few perl editors on Windows when I googled it who offer sytax checking , execute the code besides other stuff with some price. I want a tool like or similar people use TOAD for Oracle :) I was thinking like writing a perl code with a set of input data and represent it html format on Windows . Then I guess I can port it to other OS like Linux and HPUX Solaris. I think plugins part is important to know to add and make use of the provided functionalities, makes life easy lol.

I am using Perl 5.10.0 on Windows XP

Thanks again.