perlretut - Perl regular expressions tutorial
This page provides a basic tutorial on understanding, creating and using regular expressions
in Perl. It serves as a complement to the reference page on regular expressions perlre. Regular expressions are an
integral part of the m//, s///, qr// and split
operators and so this tutorial also overlaps with perlop/"Regexp
Quote-Like Operators" and perlfunc/split.
Perl is widely renowned for excellence in text processing, and regular expressions are one of
the big factors behind this fame. Perl regular expressions display an efficiency and flexibility
unknown in most other computer languages. Mastering even the basics of regular expressions will
allow you to manipulate text with surprising ease.
What is a regular expression? A regular expression is simply a string that describes a
pattern. Patterns are in common use these days; examples are the patterns typed into a search
engine to find web pages and the patterns used to list files in a directory, e.g., ls
*.txt or dir *.*. In Perl, the patterns described by regular expressions are
used to search strings, extract desired parts of strings, and to do search and replace
operations.
Regular expressions have the undeserved reputation of being abstract and difficult to
understand. Regular expressions are constructed using simple concepts like conditionals and
loops and are no more difficult to understand than the corresponding if
conditionals and while loops in the Perl language itself. In fact, the main
challenge in learning regular expressions is just getting used to the terse notation used to
express these concepts.
This tutorial flattens the learning curve by discussing regular expression concepts, along
with their notation, one at a time and with many examples. The first part of the tutorial will
progress from the simplest word searches to the basic regular expression concepts. If you master
the first part, you will have all the tools needed to solve about 98% of your needs. The second
part of the tutorial is for those comfortable with the basics and hungry for more power tools.
It discusses the more advanced regular expression operators and introduces the latest cutting
edge innovations in 5.6.0.
A note: to save time, 'regular expression' is often abbreviated as regexp or regex. Regexp is
a more natural abbreviation than regex, but is harder to pronounce. The Perl pod documentation
is evenly split on regexp vs regex; in Perl, there is more than one way to abbreviate it. We'll
use regexp in this tutorial.
Code expressions, conditional expressions, and independent expressions are experimental.
Don't use them in production code. Yet.
This is just a tutorial. For the full story on perl regular expressions, see the perlre regular expressions reference
page.
For more information on the matching m// and substitution s///
operators, see perlop/"Regexp
Quote-Like Operators". For information on the split operation, see perlfunc/split.
For an excellent all-around resource on the care and feeding of regular expressions, see the
book Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeffrey Friedl (published by O'Reilly, ISBN
1556592-257-3).
Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Kvale All rights reserved.
This document may be distributed under the same terms as Perl itself.
What kind of education you will need to quality for
interior design jobs. Learning about
culinary arts as part of your chef training. How
to overcome sleeping disorders with proper
treatment.
The inspiration for the stop codon DNA example came from the ZIP code example in chapter 7 of
Mastering Regular Expressions.
The author would like to thank Jeff Pinyan, Andrew Johnson, Peter Haworth, Ronald J Kimball,
and Joe Smith for all their helpful comments.
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