This document presents a tabular summary of the regular expression (regexp) syntax in Perl, then illustrates it with a collection of annotated examples.
Metacharacters
To present a metacharacter as a data character
standing for itself, precede it with In the table above, the characters themselves, in the first column, are links to descriptions of characters in my The ISO Latin 1 character repertoire - a description with usage notes. Note that the physical appearance (glyph) of a character may vary from one device or program or font to another. |
Repetition
Read the notation a’s as
“occurrences of strings, each of which matches
the pattern a”.
Read repetition as any of the repetition
expressions listed above it. Shortest match means that the shortest
string matching the pattern is taken.
The default is
“greedy matching”,
which finds the longest match.
The repetition
|
\
|
|
\w | matches any single character
classified as a “word” character
(alphanumeric or “_ ”) |
\W | matches any non-“word” character |
\s | matches any whitespace character (space, tab, newline) |
\S | matches any non-whitespace character |
\d | matches any digit character, equiv.
to [0-9] |
\D | matches any non-digit character |
[
...]
Different meanings apply inside a
character set (“character class”) denoted by
[
...]
so that, instead of
the normal rules given here, the following apply:
[ characters] |
matches any of the characters in the sequence |
[ x- y] |
matches any of the characters from x to y (inclusively) in the ASCII code |
[\-] | matches the hyphen character “- ” |
[\n ] | matches the newline; other
single character denotations with \
apply normally, too
|
[^ something] |
matches any character except those that
[ something] denotes; that is,
immediately after the leading “[ ”, the circumflex
“^ ”
means “not” applied to all of the rest
|
expression | matches... |
---|---|
abc |
abc (that exact character sequence, but
anywhere in the string) |
^abc |
abc at the beginning of the string
|
abc$ |
abc at the end of the string
|
a|b |
either of a and b
|
^abc|abc$ |
the string abc at the beginning or at the end
of the string
|
ab{2,4}c |
an a followed by two, three or four b ’s
followed by a c
|
ab{2,}c |
an a followed by at least two b ’s
followed by a c
|
ab*c |
an a followed by any number (zero or more) of
b ’s
followed by a c
|
ab+c |
an a followed by one or more
b ’s
followed by a c
|
ab?c |
an a followed by an optional
b
followed by a c ; that is, either abc or
ac
|
a.c |
an a followed by any single character (not newline)
followed by a c
|
a\.c |
a.c
exactly
|
[abc] |
any one of a , b and c |
[Aa]bc |
either of Abc and abc |
[abc]+ |
any (nonempty) string of a ’s, b ’s
and c’s (such as a , abba ,
acbabcacaa ) |
[^abc]+ |
any (nonempty) string which does not
contain any of a , b
and c (such as
defg ) |
\d\d |
any two decimal digits, such as 42 ;
same as \d{2} |
\w+ |
a “word”: a nonempty sequence of alphanumeric characters and
low lines (underscores), such as foo and
12bar8 and foo_1
|
100\s*mk |
the strings 100 and mk
optionally separated by any amount of white space
(spaces, tabs, newlines) |
abc\b |
abc when followed by a word
boundary (e.g. in abc! but not in abcd ) |
perl\B |
perl when not followed by a word
boundary (e.g. in perlert but not in perl stuff ) |
These examples use very simple regexps only. The
intent is just to show contexts where regexps might be
used, as well as the effect of some “flags” to matching
and replacements.
Note in particular that matching is
by default
case-sensitive
(Abc
does not match abc
unless
specified otherwise).
s/foo/bar/;
replaces the first occurrence of the exact character sequence
foo
in the “current string” (in special
variable $_
) by the character sequence bar
;
for example, foolish bigfoot
would become
barlish bigfoot
s/foo/bar/g;
replaces any occurrence of the exact character sequence
foo
in the “current string”
by the character sequence bar
;
for example, foolish bigfoot
would become
barlish bigbart
s/foo/bar/gi;
replaces any occurrence of
foo
case-insensitively in the “current string”
by the character sequence bar
(e.g. Foo
and FOO
get replaced by
bar
too)
if(m/foo/)
...
tests whether the current string contains the string foo