Summary: in this tutorial, you’ll learn about Perl operators including numeric operators, string operators, and logical operators.

Perl provides numeric operators to help you operate on numbers including arithmetic, Boolean and bitwise operations. Let’s examine the different kinds of operators in more detail.

Perl arithmetic operators deal with basic math such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, diving, etc. To add (+ ) or subtract (-) numbers, you would do something as follows:

To multiply or divide numbers, you use divide (/) and multiply (*) operators as follows:

When you combine adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing operators together, Perl will perform the calculation in an order, which is known as operator precedence.

The multiply and divide operators have higher precedence than add and subtract operators, therefore, Perl performs multiplying and dividing before adding and subtracting. See the following example:

Perl performs 20/2 and 5*2 first, therefore you will get 10 + 10 – 10 = 10.

You can use brackets () to force Perl to perform calculations based on the precedence you want as shown in the following example:

To raise one number to the power of another number, you use the exponentiation operator (**) e.g., 2**3 = 2 * 2 * 2. The following example demonstrates the exponentiation operators:

To get the remainder of the division of one number by another, you use the modulo operator (%).

It is handy to use the modulo operator (%) to check if a number is odd or even by dividing it by 2 to get the remainder. If the remainder is zero, the number is even, otherwise, the number is odd. See the following example:

Bitwise operators allow you to operate on numbers one bit at a time. Think of a number as a series of bits e.g., 125 can be represented in binary form as 1111101. Perl provides all basic bitwise operators including and (&), or (|), exclusive or (^) , not (~) operators, shift right (>>), and shift left ( 1; # 0101 shift right 1 bit, 010 or 2 print $c, "\n"; $c = $a