Perl, created and posted to numerous Usenets by Larry Wall in 1987, was originally designed to be a scripting language that combined the multiple features and functionalities from the popular UNIX-based scripting engines into one core language. Features such as sh, sed, and awk, in combination with regular expressions, instantly made Perl a hit, and with the brushfire spread of Internet computing followed by the birth of the World Wide Web (WWW), Perl quickly became a household name in the world of scripting.

Perl increased in popularity throughout the expansion of the WWW because it was quickly deemed one of the easiest methods for creating common gateway interface (CGI) applications. Such applications are used to provide dynamic data to Web users, enable access to databases, and provide common data formats and mechanisms for communicating with other applications. Perl is best known for the flexibility and implementation of regular expressions (regex) and is often cited as having the most powerful regex engine. Perl s regex engine allows you to create pattern matching and string substitution algorithms in one line of Perl code that potentially could have taken hundreds of lines of C code. For example, the following expression will search a supplied string and replace all occurrences of the string cat with the string dog :

  Expression:  $mystring =~ s/cat/dog/;

In C, an algorithm within a loop structure to read in all data, process characters, and then replace strings of characters would have been a much...