note jhourcle <p>Sometimes, a comment will work just as well, without the overhead. Consider the following:</p> <code>local $/; # INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR</code> <p>As another option, in the documenation for 'English', there's a suggestion to use:</p> <code>use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;</code> <p>to prevent the problems mentioned.</p> <p>As for the 'evil variables', the following note is in 'perldoc perlre':</p><blockquote> WARNING: Once Perl sees that you need one of $&, $`, or $' anywhere in the program, it has to provide them for every pattern match. This may substantially slow your program. Perl uses the same mechanism to produce $1, $2, etc, so you also pay a price for each pattern that contains capturing parentheses. (To avoid this cost while retaining the grouping behaviour, use the extended regular expression "(?: ... )" instead.) But if you never use $&, $` or $', then patterns without capturing parentheses will not be penalized. So avoid $&, $', and $` if you can, but if you can't (and some algorithms really appreciate them), once you've used them once, use them at will, because you've already paid the price. As of 5.005, $& is not so costly as the other two.</blockquote> 462148 462170