Lexical variables

These are the variables used in the vast majority of cases.

A variable declared using the my keyword is a lexical variable. It lives from the place where it was declared using the my keyword till the end of the current block. (Pair of curly braces.) This is the scope of the variable.

If it is declared outside of any block, it lives till the end of the file. Its scope is the whole file starting from the point of declaration.

my $x;
my @y;
my %z;

Static or state variables

Version 5.10 introduced a new keyword called state. Using this keyword will declare a lexical variable, just as my does, but it the variable will be initialized only once. It is really only interesting in subroutines that are called more than once. There they behave like static variables in some other languages.

sub f {
   state $x = 0;
   state @z;
   state %h;
}

state cannot be used in list context which poses some limitation, but in most case a bit of workaround can solve the problem. Like in this example.

Package variable

These are the oldest type of variables in Perl. They are still used in some cases, even though in most cases you should just use lexical variables.

In old times, if we started to use a variable without declaring it with the my or state keywords, we automatically got a variable in the current namespace. Thus we could write:

$x = 42;
print "$x\n";  # 42

Please note, we don't use strict; in these examples. Even though you should always use strict. We'll fix this in a bit.

The default namespace in every perl script is called "main" and you can always access variables using their full name including the namespace:

$x = 42;
print "$x\n";        # 42
print "$main::x\n";  # 42

The package keyword is used to switch namespaces:

$x = 42;
print "$x\n";        # 42

print "$main::x\n";  # 42

package Foo;
print "Foo: $x\n";   # Foo:

Please note, once we switched to the "Foo" namespace, the $x name refers to the variable in the Foo namespace. It does not have any value yet.

$x = 42;
print "$x\n";        # 42

print "$main::x\n";  # 42

package Foo;
print "Foo: $x\n";   # Foo:
$x = 23;
print "Foo: $x\n";   # Foo 23;

Do we really have two $x-es? Can we reach the $x in the main namespace while we are in the Foo namespace?

$x = 42;
print "$x\n";              # 42

print "$main::x\n";        # 42

package Foo;
print "Foo: $x\n";         # Foo:
$x = 23;
print "Foo: $x\n";         # Foo 23
print "main: $main::x\n";  # main: 42
print "Foo: $Foo::x\n";    # Foo: 23

package main;

print "main: $main::x\n";  # main: 42
print "Foo: $Foo::x\n";    # Foo: 23
print "$x\n";              # 42

We even switched back to the main namespace (using package main;) and if you look closely, you can see that while we were already in the main package we could reach to the $x of the Foo package using $Foo::x but if we accessed $x without the full package name, we reach the one in the main namespace.

Every package (or namespace) can hold variables with the same name.

use strict - and use explicit package name

As I mentioned, the above code did not use strict;. That's because it would require us to declare the variables using my as explained here.

Actually, if we put use strict; at the beginning of the above code, and we'll get Global symbol "$x" requires explicit package name ....

Try this:

use strict;

$x = 42;
print "$x\n";

Now we might already understand what does that error message really mean. We don't have to declare the variables using my. We could use the explicit package name like this:

use strict;

$main::x = 42;
print "$main::x\n";

This will already work and we are using the same package-variable as we did earlier.

We could even access the variable in the Foo namespace:

use strict;

$main::x = 42;
print "$main::x\n";   # 42

$Foo::x = 23;
print "$Foo::x\n";    # 23
print "$main::x\n";   # 42

Of course this is going to be really tiring after a while. Especially if we want to access a package variable in the current package, we don't want to write down the name of the package again and again:

use strict;
package VeryLongName;
$VeryLongName::x = 23;
print "VeryLongName: $VeryLongName::x\n";

This works, but we don't like to type so much.

use vars

The problem is that use strict is complaining that there is a variable $x which is not declared with my and that it does not know about it. So we need a way to tell strict that it is ok. We know about the $x variable and we want to use it, but we want it to be a package variable. We don't want to declare it using my and we don't want to always prefix it with the package name.

With use vars ('$x') we can achieve that:

use strict;

package VeryLongName;
use vars ('$x');
$x = 23;
print "VeryLongName: $x\n";

This works, but the documentation of vars tells us that the functionality provided by this pragma has been superseded by "our" declarations.

So how does our work?

our

use strict;

package VeryLongName;
our $x = 23;
print "VeryLongName: $x\n";

Caveat

The our declaration itself is lexically scoped, meaning it is limited by the file or by enclosing curly braces. In the next example we don't have curly braces and thus the declaration our $x = 23; will be intact even after switching namespaces. This can lead to very unpleasant situations. My recommendation is to avoid using our (you almost always need to use my anyway) and to put every package in its own file.

use strict;

package VeryLongName;
our $x = 23;
print "VeryLongName: $x\n"; # VeryLongName: 23

package main;
print "$x\n";  # 23

Comments

Gabor - I'm having problems accessing a hash in the beginning of a program within a subroutine. my %TK={'title'=>'does not work'}; sub dosomething { print join(', ', (keys %TK)); } only works when I change my to our. Any other solutions?

--- In this example you never call dosomething. Show a full example please. ---

You're assigning anonymous hash to %TK. Change curly brackets to ordinary parenthesis:

my %TK=('title'=>'does not work');

Or consequently try to use references.