Perl go up a character?

Question

In Perl, lets say I have the letter A in variable called $character, and I want it to go up to B, how would I do this? The $character can also be numbers (0-8) and I want the method work on both of them? (Something like binary shift, but not exactly sure if it is something like that). Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Simple increment should do what you want:

my $character = "A";
$character++;

from perl-doc:

The auto-increment operator has a little extra builtin magic to it. If you increment a variable that is numeric, or that has ever been used in a numeric context, you get a normal increment. If, however, the variable has been used in only string contexts since it was set, and has a value that is not the empty string and matches the pattern /^a-zA-Z*0-9*\z/ , the increment is done as a string, preserving each character within its range, with carry

Answer 2

The increment operator may be what you want. However, do make sure that you want the boundary behavior. For instance:

my $character = 'Z';
print ++$character;

Produces:

AA

This is the "with carry" from http://perldoc.perl.org/perlop.html#Auto-increment-and-Auto-decrement.