Perl semicolon at end of statement

Question

The ; is used as a statement delimiter, so placing multiple ; at the end of a statement is fine as it just adds empty statements.

I came across this code which has multiple ; at the end but deleting them causing errors:

$line =~s;[.,]$;;;

should be same as

$line =~s;[.,;]$;

but it is not. What's going on?

Answer 1

in the snippet provided by you a ; is used as a delimiter for a search-n-replace regular expression.

$line =~s;[.,]$;;;

is equivalent to

$line =~ s/[.,]$//;

Answer 2

In your code only the last ; is the statement delimiter. The others are regex delimiters which the substitution operator takes. A better way to write this is:

$line =~s/[.,]$//;

Since you must have the statement delimiter and regex delimiters in your statement, you can't drop any of the trailing ;