Regular Expressions in Perl—Pattern Matching
- May 15, 2008
- 8.1 What Is a Regular Expression?
- 8.2 Expression Modifiers and Simple Statements
- 8.3 Regular Expression Operators
- 8.4 What You Should Know
- 8.5 What's Next?
This chapter is from the book
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8.1 What Is a Regular Expression?
If you are familiar with UNIX utilities, such as vi, sed, grep, and awk, you have met face-to-face with the infamous regular expressions and metacharacters used in delimiting search patterns. Well, with Perl, they're back!
What is a regular expression, anyway? A regular expression is really just a sequence, or pattern, of characters that is matched against a string of text when performing searches and replacements. A simple regular expression consists of a character or set of characters that matches itself. The regular expression is normally delimited by forward slashes.1 The special scalar $_ is the default search space where Perl does its pattern matching. $_ is like a shadow. Sometimes you see it; sometimes you don't. Don't worry; all this will become clear as you read through this chapter.
Example 8.1.
1 /abc/ 2 ?abc?
Explanation
- The pattern abc is enclosed in forward slashes. If searching for this pattern, for example, in a string or text file, any string that contained the pattern abc would be matched.
- The pattern abc is enclosed in question marks. If searching for this pattern, only the first occurrence of the string is matched. (See the reset function in Appendix A.)
