Operator Types

Perl’s operators provide value contexts to their operands. To choose the appropriate operator, we must know the values of the operands we provide and the value we expect to receive.

Numeric operators

Numeric operators impose numeric contexts on their operands. These operators are the standard arithmetic operators of addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*), division (/), exponentiation (**), and modulo (%), their in-place variants (+=, -=, *=, /=, **=, and %=), and both postfix and prefix autodecrement (--).

The auto-increment operator has special string behavior (discussed under “Special operators” below).

Several comparison operators impose numeric contexts upon their operands. These are numeric equality (==), numeric inequality (!=), greater than (gt), less than (lt), greater than or equal to (gt=), less than or equal to (lt=), and the sort comparison operator (lt=gt).

String operators

String operators impose string ...