Some of these functions allow you to find the string’s length, get a substring or the position of a substring in a string, change the case of the characters in the string, to mention only some of them.
In calling these functions, if no argument variable is specified, the respective function will use by default the special variable $_.
We’ll shortly describe below some of the most frequently used Perl string functions:
| chomp | removes trailing newlines and returns the number of characters removed |
| chop | removes and returns the last character from a string |
| chr | converts ASCII or Unicode values into their corresponding characters |
| crypt | allows you to store passwords or other sensitive data using ASCII characters as encrypted strings |
| hex | converts a hex string into the numerical corresponding value |
| index | returns the position of the first occurrence of a substring in a string |
| lc | converts all the characters of a string in lowercase and returns the new string |
| lcfirst | converts the first character of a string in lowercase and returns the new string |
| length | returns the number of bytes/characters in a string |
| oct | converts an octal string into the numerical corresponding value |
| ord | converts a character into its ASCII/Unicode corresponding value |
| pack | converts a list into a string, according to a user-defined template (ex. a binary representation of a list) |
| q/STRING/ | singly quote a string |
| qq/STRING/ | doubly quote a string |
| reverse | in scalar context, concatenates the elements of a list and returns a string value with all characters in the opposite order |
| rindex | is similar to index, but returns the position of the last occurrence of a substring in a string |
| sprintf | emulates the C sprintf function |
| substr | extracts a substring from a string and returns it |
| tr/// | transliterate a string |
| uc | converts all the characters of a string in uppercases and returns the new string |
| ucfirst | converts the first character of a string in uppercase and returns the new string |