Strawberry Perl not recognising special variable for OSNAME

Question

I recently upgraded Strawberry Perl from version 5.14.1.1-32bit to 5.24.0-64bit on my PC running Windows 7. I have a perl script I run under both Windows and Linux, and when I was using the old version the command

use if $^O eq 'MSWin32' , 'Win32::Console::ANSI';

worked, but now that I've upgraded I get the error message

Unrecognized character \x0F; marked by <-- HERE after use if $<-- HERE near column9 at p:\bin\abc.pl line 31.

Does anyone know what changed, and how I can get the new version of Strawberry Perl to accept the command? Thanks in advance to all who respond.

Answer 1

Your code contains the Shift In control character (0x0F), also known as "Control-O", instead of the characters ^ and O. This works in older versions of Perl but was deprecated in version 5.20.0:

Literal control characters in variable names

This deprecation affects things like $\cT, where \cT is a literal control (such as a NAK or NEGATIVE ACKNOWLEDGE character) in the source code. Surprisingly, it appears that originally this was intended as the canonical way of accessing variables like $^T, with the caret form only being added as an alternative.

The literal control form is being deprecated for two main reasons. It has what are likely unfixable bugs, such as $\cI not working as an alias for $^I, and their usage not being portable to non-ASCII platforms: While $^T will work everywhere, \cT is whitespace in EBCDIC. [perl #119123]

As of 5.24.0, using a variable name containing non-graphical ASCII control characters results in a syntax error.