how to add space between printing strings

[Anonymous Monk]

I have to strings one if for 1st name the next is for last name. it prints out like this"1stlast" I want 1st last how can I do this. what can I use as an operator?

[GrandFather]

Show us your code then we can more easily see what is not right. I'd guess you are either concatenating two variables with the concatenation operator, in which case you need to concatenate a space in between, or you are interpolating two variables into a string, in which case you simply insert a space between the two variables.

I've got some code samples that demonstrate those two techniques, but I'm not going to show you mine until you've shown me yours.

[bv]

TIMTOWTDI. Here are a few:

my ($first,$last) = ("John", "Doe");

# interpolate into a string:
print "$first $last\n";

# put a literal space between them in list context:
print $first, ' ', $last,"\n";

# join a list of values with space. This works with arrays, too
print join(' ', ($first, $last)),"\n";

# $, is the output field separator
{
    local $,=' ';
    # prints "John Doe \n", note the space at the end!
    print $first, $last, "\n";
}

[Tanktalus]

How are you printing it out?

print $f,$l,"\n";
#becomes one of:
{ local $, = ' '; print $f, $l; print "\n"; }
print $f, ' ', $l, "\n";
print join(' ', $f, $l), "\n";

or maybe

print $f . $l . "\n";
# becomes
print $f . " " . $l . "\n";

or maybe

print "$f$l\n";
# becomes
print "$f $l\n";

or maybe

printf "%s%s\n", $f, $l;
# becomes
printf "%s %s\n", $f, $l;

But I'm not sure what you're doing now, so it's hard to tell which one is most similar to your existing code.

[Marshall]

print "$first_name $last_name\n"; Perl interpolates the $var names within double quotes in a print.
BTW, a valid var name can not start with a digit. (1st_name is not right).