Golf Do-s and Don't-s

[japhy]

With the onslaught of golf meditations recently (of which I shall soon be posting one -- fear not!), I'm posting a set of reminders that you may be wont to take heed of, ere you post again!

• if you use a regex, be sure . can match a newline, by using the /s modifier to the regex
• pop is two characters less than shift
• assign to @_ and $_ if you can -- it saves a my declaration (if you're stingy), and allows operations like regexes and pop to work without an argument
• screw $1 and the like, and use $& and its friends instead
• map() is probably a useful tool to master for golf
• leave out semicolons wherever possible
• don't explicitly return unless you must
• doing .$/ is shorter than ."\n" -- same for .$" vs. ." "
• {...;redo} is shorter than while(1){...}
• {...;$x&&redo} is shorter than while($x){...}
• use || and &&

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker

[dragonchild]

A few questions on technique:
1. Is there anything shorter than join'',?
2. What are some good sorting techniques?

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[Anonymous Monk]

Is there anything shorter than join'',?

It depends. This:

    $"="";"@_"

is one character more than

    join"",@_

but if you have to do two joins,

    $"="";"@a";"@b"

is shorter than

    join"","@a";join"","@b"