Newlines in Single-quoted Strings

Note that there is no rule against having a single-quoted string span several lines. When you do this, the string has newline characters embedded in it.

A newline character is a special ASCII character that indicates that a new line should be started. In a text editor, or when printing output to the screen, this usually indicates that the cursor should move from the end of the current line to the first position on the line following it.

Since Perl permits the placement of these newline characters directly into single quoted strings, we are permitted to do the following:

     'Time to
     start anew.';   # Represents the single string composed of:
                     # 'Time to' followed by a newline, followed by
                     # 'start anew.'
     

This string has a total of twenty characters. The first seven are Time to. The next character following that is a newline. Then, the eleven characters, start anew. follow. Note again that this is one string, with a newline as its eighth character.

Further, note that we are not permitted to put a comment in the middle of the string, even though we are usually allowed to place a # anywhere on the line and have the rest of the line be a comment. We cannot do this here, since we have yet to terminate our single-quoted string with a ', and thus, any # character and comment following it would actually become part of the single-quoted string! Remember that single-quotes strings are delimited by ' at the beginning, and ' at the end, and everything in between is considered part of the string, included newlines, # characters and anything else.