Leaning Toothpick Syndrome

One thing that's always bothered me about PHP is it's lack of a qq style operator. For example, in Perl, I could do something like this:

print qq/a $fun "string" with "double quotes"/;

In PHP it'd be something gross like:

print "a $fun \"string\" with \"double quotes\"";

Anyway, I found a nice solution that's been right under my nose all this time:

printf('a %s "string" with "double quotes"', $fun);

This is quite a bit cleaner for things like hyperlinks, so I thought I'd pass it along.

Ruby borrows quite a few ideas from Perl, and has a very nice %Q operator:

print %Q/a #{fun} "string" with "double quotes"/

going even further, you can use %r for regexp:

mystring =~ %r{/usr/src/linux} # no leaning toothpick required

or in Perl:

$mystring =~ m#/usr/src/linux#