perlrebackslash(1)


NAME

   perlrebackslash - Perl Regular Expression Backslash Sequences and
   Escapes

DESCRIPTION

   The top level documentation about Perl regular expressions is found in
   perlre.

   This document describes all backslash and escape sequences. After
   explaining the role of the backslash, it lists all the sequences that
   have a special meaning in Perl regular expressions (in alphabetical
   order), then describes each of them.

   Most sequences are described in detail in different documents; the
   primary purpose of this document is to have a quick reference guide
   describing all backslash and escape sequences.

   The backslash
   In a regular expression, the backslash can perform one of two tasks: it
   either takes away the special meaning of the character following it
   (for instance, "\|" matches a vertical bar, it's not an alternation),
   or it is the start of a backslash or escape sequence.

   The rules determining what it is are quite simple: if the character
   following the backslash is an ASCII punctuation (non-word) character
   (that is, anything that is not a letter, digit, or underscore), then
   the backslash just takes away any special meaning of the character
   following it.

   If the character following the backslash is an ASCII letter or an ASCII
   digit, then the sequence may be special; if so, it's listed below. A
   few letters have not been used yet, so escaping them with a backslash
   doesn't change them to be special.  A future version of Perl may assign
   a special meaning to them, so if you have warnings turned on, Perl
   issues a warning if you use such a sequence.  [1].

   It is however guaranteed that backslash or escape sequences never have
   a punctuation character following the backslash, not now, and not in a
   future version of Perl 5. So it is safe to put a backslash in front of
   a non-word character.

   Note that the backslash itself is special; if you want to match a
   backslash, you have to escape the backslash with a backslash: "/\\/"
   matches a single backslash.

   [1] There is one exception. If you use an alphanumeric character as the
       delimiter of your pattern (which you probably shouldn't do for
       readability reasons), you have to escape the delimiter if you want
       to match it. Perl won't warn then. See also "Gory details of
       parsing quoted constructs" in perlop.

   All the sequences and escapes
   Those not usable within a bracketed character class (like "[\da-z]")
   are marked as "Not in []."

    \000              Octal escape sequence.  See also \o{}.
    \1                Absolute backreference.  Not in [].
    
                Alarm or bell.
    \A                Beginning of string.  Not in [].
    	{}, 	          Boundary. (	 is a backspace in []).
    \B{}, \B          Not a boundary.  Not in [].
    \cX               Control-X.
    \d                Character class for digits.
    \D                Character class for non-digits.
    \e                Escape character.
    \E                Turn off \Q, \L and \U processing.  Not in [].
    \f                Form feed.
    \F                Foldcase till \E.  Not in [].
    \g{}, \g1         Named, absolute or relative backreference.
                      Not in [].
    \G                Pos assertion.  Not in [].
    \h                Character class for horizontal whitespace.
    \H                Character class for non horizontal whitespace.
    \k{}, \k<>, \k''  Named backreference.  Not in [].
    \K                Keep the stuff left of \K.  Not in [].
    \l                Lowercase next character.  Not in [].
    \L                Lowercase till \E.  Not in [].
    \n                (Logical) newline character.
    \N                Any character but newline.  Not in [].
    \N{}              Named or numbered (Unicode) character or sequence.
    \o{}              Octal escape sequence.
    \p{}, \pP         Character with the given Unicode property.
    \P{}, \PP         Character without the given Unicode property.
    \Q                Quote (disable) pattern metacharacters till \E.  Not
                      in [].
    \r                Return character.
    \R                Generic new line.  Not in [].
    \s                Character class for whitespace.
    \S                Character class for non whitespace.
    \t                Tab character.
    \u                Titlecase next character.  Not in [].
    \U                Uppercase till \E.  Not in [].
    \v                Character class for vertical whitespace.
    \V                Character class for non vertical whitespace.
    \w                Character class for word characters.
    \W                Character class for non-word characters.
    \x{}, \x00        Hexadecimal escape sequence.
    \X                Unicode "extended grapheme cluster".  Not in [].
    \z                End of string.  Not in [].
    \Z                End of string.  Not in [].

   Character Escapes
   Fixed characters

   A handful of characters have a dedicated character escape. The
   following table shows them, along with their ASCII code points (in
   decimal and hex), their ASCII name, the control escape on ASCII
   platforms and a short description.  (For EBCDIC platforms, see
   "OPERATOR DIFFERENCES" in perlebcdic.)

    Seq.  Code Point  ASCII   Cntrl   Description.
          Dec    Hex
     
     7     07    BEL    \cG    alarm or bell
     	     8     08     BS    \cH    backspace [1]
     \e    27     1B    ESC    \c[    escape character
     \f    12     0C     FF    \cL    form feed
     \n    10     0A     LF    \cJ    line feed [2]
     \r    13     0D     CR    \cM    carriage return
     \t     9     09    TAB    \cI    tab

   [1] "	" is the backspace character only inside a character class.
       Outside a character class, "	" alone is a
       word-character/non-word-character boundary, and "	{}" is some
       other type of boundary.

   [2] "\n" matches a logical newline. Perl converts between "\n" and your
       OS's native newline character when reading from or writing to text
       files.

   Example

    $str =~ /\t/;   # Matches if $str contains a (horizontal) tab.

   Control characters

   "\c" is used to denote a control character; the character following
   "\c" determines the value of the construct.  For example the value of
   "\cA" is chr(1), and the value of "\cb" is chr(2), etc.  The gory
   details are in "Regexp Quote-Like Operators" in perlop.  A complete
   list of what chr(1), etc. means for ASCII and EBCDIC platforms is in
   "OPERATOR DIFFERENCES" in perlebcdic.

   Note that "\c\" alone at the end of a regular expression (or doubled-
   quoted string) is not valid.  The backslash must be followed by another
   character.  That is, "\c\X" means "chr(28) . 'X'" for all characters X.

   To write platform-independent code, you must use "\N{NAME}" instead,
   like "\N{ESCAPE}" or "\N{U+001B}", see charnames.

   Mnemonic: control character.

   Example

    $str =~ /\cK/;  # Matches if $str contains a vertical tab (control-K).

   Named or numbered characters and character sequences

   Unicode characters have a Unicode name and numeric code point (ordinal)
   value.  Use the "\N{}" construct to specify a character by either of
   these values.  Certain sequences of characters also have names.

   To specify by name, the name of the character or character sequence
   goes between the curly braces.

   To specify a character by Unicode code point, use the form "\N{U+code
   point}", where code point is a number in hexadecimal that gives the
   code point that Unicode has assigned to the desired character.  It is
   customary but not required to use leading zeros to pad the number to 4
   digits.  Thus "\N{U+0041}" means "LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A", and you will
   rarely see it written without the two leading zeros.  "\N{U+0041}"
   means "A" even on EBCDIC machines (where the ordinal value of "A" is
   not 0x41).

   It is even possible to give your own names to characters and character
   sequences.  For details, see charnames.

   (There is an expanded internal form that you may see in debug output:
   "\N{U+code point.code point...}".  The "..." means any number of these
   code points separated by dots.  This represents the sequence formed by
   the characters.  This is an internal form only, subject to change, and
   you should not try to use it yourself.)

   Mnemonic: Named character.

   Note that a character or character sequence expressed as a named or
   numbered character is considered a character without special meaning by
   the regex engine, and will match "as is".

   Example

    $str =~ /\N{THAI CHARACTER SO SO}/;  # Matches the Thai SO SO character

    use charnames 'Cyrillic';            # Loads Cyrillic names.
    $str =~ /\N{ZHE}\N{KA}/;             # Match "ZHE" followed by "KA".

   Octal escapes

   There are two forms of octal escapes.  Each is used to specify a
   character by its code point specified in octal notation.

   One form, available starting in Perl 5.14 looks like "\o{...}", where
   the dots represent one or more octal digits.  It can be used for any
   Unicode character.

   It was introduced to avoid the potential problems with the other form,
   available in all Perls.  That form consists of a backslash followed by
   three octal digits.  One problem with this form is that it can look
   exactly like an old-style backreference (see "Disambiguation rules
   between old-style octal escapes and backreferences" below.)  You can
   avoid this by making the first of the three digits always a zero, but
   that makes \077 the largest code point specifiable.

   In some contexts, a backslash followed by two or even one octal digits
   may be interpreted as an octal escape, sometimes with a warning, and
   because of some bugs, sometimes with surprising results.  Also, if you
   are creating a regex out of smaller snippets concatenated together, and
   you use fewer than three digits, the beginning of one snippet may be
   interpreted as adding digits to the ending of the snippet before it.
   See "Absolute referencing" for more discussion and examples of the
   snippet problem.

   Note that a character expressed as an octal escape is considered a
   character without special meaning by the regex engine, and will match
   "as is".

   To summarize, the "\o{}" form is always safe to use, and the other form
   is safe to use for code points through \077 when you use exactly three
   digits to specify them.

   Mnemonic: 0ctal or octal.

   Examples (assuming an ASCII platform)

    $str = "Perl";
    $str =~ /\o{120}/;  # Match, "\120" is "P".
    $str =~ /\120/;     # Same.
    $str =~ /\o{120}+/; # Match, "\120" is "P",
                        # it's repeated at least once.
    $str =~ /\120+/;    # Same.
    $str =~ /P\053/;    # No match, "\053" is "+" and taken literally.
    /\o{23073}/         # Black foreground, white background smiling face.
    /\o{4801234567}/    # Raises a warning, and yields chr(4).

   Disambiguation rules between old-style octal escapes and backreferences

   Octal escapes of the "\000" form outside of bracketed character classes
   potentially clash with old-style backreferences (see "Absolute
   referencing" below).  They both consist of a backslash followed by
   numbers.  So Perl has to use heuristics to determine whether it is a
   backreference or an octal escape.  Perl uses the following rules to
   disambiguate:

   1.  If the backslash is followed by a single digit, it's a
       backreference.

   2.  If the first digit following the backslash is a 0, it's an octal
       escape.

   3.  If the number following the backslash is N (in decimal), and Perl
       already has seen N capture groups, Perl considers this a
       backreference.  Otherwise, it considers it an octal escape. If N
       has more than three digits, Perl takes only the first three for the
       octal escape; the rest are matched as is.

        my $pat  = "(" x 999;
           $pat .= "a";
           $pat .= ")" x 999;
        /^($pat)\1000$/;   #  Matches 'aa'; there are 1000 capture groups.
        /^$pat\1000$/;     #  Matches 'a@0'; there are 999 capture groups
                           #  and \1000 is seen as \100 (a '@') and a '0'.

   You can force a backreference interpretation always by using the
   "\g{...}" form.  You can the force an octal interpretation always by
   using the "\o{...}" form, or for numbers up through \077 (= 63
   decimal), by using three digits, beginning with a "0".

   Hexadecimal escapes

   Like octal escapes, there are two forms of hexadecimal escapes, but
   both start with the sequence "\x".  This is followed by either exactly
   two hexadecimal digits forming a number, or a hexadecimal number of
   arbitrary length surrounded by curly braces. The hexadecimal number is
   the code point of the character you want to express.

   Note that a character expressed as one of these escapes is considered a
   character without special meaning by the regex engine, and will match
   "as is".

   Mnemonic: hexadecimal.

   Examples (assuming an ASCII platform)

    $str = "Perl";
    $str =~ /\x50/;    # Match, "\x50" is "P".
    $str =~ /\x50+/;   # Match, "\x50" is "P", it is repeated at least once
    $str =~ /P\x2B/;   # No match, "\x2B" is "+" and taken literally.

    /\x{2603}\x{2602}/ # Snowman with an umbrella.
                       # The Unicode character 2603 is a snowman,
                       # the Unicode character 2602 is an umbrella.
    /\x{263B}/         # Black smiling face.
    /\x{263b}/         # Same, the hex digits A - F are case insensitive.

   Modifiers
   A number of backslash sequences have to do with changing the character,
   or characters following them. "\l" will lowercase the character
   following it, while "\u" will uppercase (or, more accurately,
   titlecase) the character following it. They provide functionality
   similar to the functions "lcfirst" and "ucfirst".

   To uppercase or lowercase several characters, one might want to use
   "\L" or "\U", which will lowercase/uppercase all characters following
   them, until either the end of the pattern or the next occurrence of
   "\E", whichever comes first. They provide functionality similar to what
   the functions "lc" and "uc" provide.

   "\Q" is used to quote (disable) pattern metacharacters, up to the next
   "\E" or the end of the pattern. "\Q" adds a backslash to any character
   that could have special meaning to Perl.  In the ASCII range, it quotes
   every character that isn't a letter, digit, or underscore.  See
   "quotemeta" in perlfunc for details on what gets quoted for non-ASCII
   code points.  Using this ensures that any character between "\Q" and
   "\E" will be matched literally, not interpreted as a metacharacter by
   the regex engine.

   "\F" can be used to casefold all characters following, up to the next
   "\E" or the end of the pattern. It provides the functionality similar
   to the "fc" function.

   Mnemonic: Lowercase, Uppercase, Fold-case, Quotemeta, End.

   Examples

    $sid     = "sid";
    $greg    = "GrEg";
    $miranda = "(Miranda)";
    $str     =~ /\u$sid/;        # Matches 'Sid'
    $str     =~ /\L$greg/;       # Matches 'greg'
    $str     =~ /\Q$miranda\E/;  # Matches '(Miranda)', as if the pattern
                                 #   had been written as /\(Miranda\)/

   Character classes
   Perl regular expressions have a large range of character classes. Some
   of the character classes are written as a backslash sequence. We will
   briefly discuss those here; full details of character classes can be
   found in perlrecharclass.

   "\w" is a character class that matches any single word character
   (letters, digits, Unicode marks, and connector punctuation (like the
   underscore)).  "\d" is a character class that matches any decimal
   digit, while the character class "\s" matches any whitespace character.
   New in perl 5.10.0 are the classes "\h" and "\v" which match horizontal
   and vertical whitespace characters.

   The exact set of characters matched by "\d", "\s", and "\w" varies
   depending on various pragma and regular expression modifiers.  It is
   possible to restrict the match to the ASCII range by using the "/a"
   regular expression modifier.  See perlrecharclass.

   The uppercase variants ("\W", "\D", "\S", "\H", and "\V") are character
   classes that match, respectively, any character that isn't a word
   character, digit, whitespace, horizontal whitespace, or vertical
   whitespace.

   Mnemonics: word, digit, space, horizontal, vertical.

   Unicode classes

   "\pP" (where "P" is a single letter) and "\p{Property}" are used to
   match a character that matches the given Unicode property; properties
   include things like "letter", or "thai character". Capitalizing the
   sequence to "\PP" and "\P{Property}" make the sequence match a
   character that doesn't match the given Unicode property. For more
   details, see "Backslash sequences" in perlrecharclass and "Unicode
   Character Properties" in perlunicode.

   Mnemonic: property.

   Referencing
   If capturing parenthesis are used in a regular expression, we can refer
   to the part of the source string that was matched, and match exactly
   the same thing. There are three ways of referring to such
   backreference: absolutely, relatively, and by name.

   Absolute referencing

   Either "\gN" (starting in Perl 5.10.0), or "\N" (old-style) where N is
   a positive (unsigned) decimal number of any length is an absolute
   reference to a capturing group.

   N refers to the Nth set of parentheses, so "\gN" refers to whatever has
   been matched by that set of parentheses.  Thus "\g1" refers to the
   first capture group in the regex.

   The "\gN" form can be equivalently written as "\g{N}" which avoids
   ambiguity when building a regex by concatenating shorter strings.
   Otherwise if you had a regex "qr/$a$b/", and $a contained "\g1", and $b
   contained "37", you would get "/\g137/" which is probably not what you
   intended.

   In the "\N" form, N must not begin with a "0", and there must be at
   least N capturing groups, or else N is considered an octal escape (but
   something like "\18" is the same as "\0018"; that is, the octal escape
   "\001" followed by a literal digit "8").

   Mnemonic: group.

   Examples

    /(\w+) \g1/;    # Finds a duplicated word, (e.g. "cat cat").
    /(\w+) \1/;     # Same thing; written old-style.
    /(.)(.)\g2\g1/;  # Match a four letter palindrome (e.g. "ABBA").

   Relative referencing

   "\g-N" (starting in Perl 5.10.0) is used for relative addressing.  (It
   can be written as "\g{-N".)  It refers to the Nth group before the
   "\g{-N}".

   The big advantage of this form is that it makes it much easier to write
   patterns with references that can be interpolated in larger patterns,
   even if the larger pattern also contains capture groups.

   Examples

    /(A)        # Group 1
     (          # Group 2
       (B)      # Group 3
       \g{-1}   # Refers to group 3 (B)
       \g{-3}   # Refers to group 1 (A)
     )
    /x;         # Matches "ABBA".

    my $qr = qr /(.)(.)\g{-2}\g{-1}/;  # Matches 'abab', 'cdcd', etc.
    /$qr$qr/                           # Matches 'ababcdcd'.

   Named referencing

   "\g{name}" (starting in Perl 5.10.0) can be used to back refer to a
   named capture group, dispensing completely with having to think about
   capture buffer positions.

   To be compatible with .Net regular expressions, "\g{name}" may also be
   written as "\k{name}", "\k<name>" or "\k'name'".

   To prevent any ambiguity, name must not start with a digit nor contain
   a hyphen.

   Examples

    /(?<word>\w+) \g{word}/ # Finds duplicated word, (e.g. "cat cat")
    /(?<word>\w+) \k{word}/ # Same.
    /(?<word>\w+) \k<word>/ # Same.
    /(?<letter1>.)(?<letter2>.)\g{letter2}\g{letter1}/
                            # Match a four letter palindrome (e.g. "ABBA")

   Assertions
   Assertions are conditions that have to be true; they don't actually
   match parts of the substring. There are six assertions that are written
   as backslash sequences.

   \A  "\A" only matches at the beginning of the string. If the "/m"
       modifier isn't used, then "/\A/" is equivalent to "/^/". However,
       if the "/m" modifier is used, then "/^/" matches internal newlines,
       but the meaning of "/\A/" isn't changed by the "/m" modifier. "\A"
       matches at the beginning of the string regardless whether the "/m"
       modifier is used.

   \z, \Z
       "\z" and "\Z" match at the end of the string. If the "/m" modifier
       isn't used, then "/\Z/" is equivalent to "/$/"; that is, it matches
       at the end of the string, or one before the newline at the end of
       the string. If the "/m" modifier is used, then "/$/" matches at
       internal newlines, but the meaning of "/\Z/" isn't changed by the
       "/m" modifier. "\Z" matches at the end of the string (or just
       before a trailing newline) regardless whether the "/m" modifier is
       used.

       "\z" is just like "\Z", except that it does not match before a
       trailing newline. "\z" matches at the end of the string only,
       regardless of the modifiers used, and not just before a newline.
       It is how to anchor the match to the true end of the string under
       all conditions.

   \G  "\G" is usually used only in combination with the "/g" modifier. If
       the "/g" modifier is used and the match is done in scalar context,
       Perl remembers where in the source string the last match ended, and
       the next time, it will start the match from where it ended the
       previous time.

       "\G" matches the point where the previous match on that string
       ended, or the beginning of that string if there was no previous
       match.

       Mnemonic: Global.

   	{}, 	, \B{}, \B
       "	{...}", available starting in v5.22, matches a boundary (between
       two characters, or before the first character of the string, or
       after the final character of the string) based on the Unicode rules
       for the boundary type specified inside the braces.  The boundary
       types are given a few paragraphs below.  "\B{...}" matches at any
       place between characters where "	{...}" of the same type doesn't
       match.

       "	" when not immediately followed by a "{" matches at any place
       between a word (something matched by "\w") and a non-word character
       ("\W"); "\B" when not immediately followed by a "{" matches at any
       place between characters where "	" doesn't match.  To get better
       word matching of natural language text, see "	{wb}" below.

       "	" and "\B" assume there's a non-word character before the
       beginning and after the end of the source string; so "	" will
       match at the beginning (or end) of the source string if the source
       string begins (or ends) with a word character. Otherwise, "\B" will
       match.

       Do not use something like "	=head\d	" and expect it to match the
       beginning of a line.  It can't, because for there to be a boundary
       before the non-word "=", there must be a word character immediately
       previous.  All plain "	" and "\B" boundary determinations look for
       word characters alone, not for non-word characters nor for string
       ends.  It may help to understand how "	" and "\B" work by equating
       them as follows:

           	  really means    (?:(?<=\w)(?!\w)|(?<!\w)(?=\w))
           \B  really means    (?:(?<=\w)(?=\w)|(?<!\w)(?!\w))

       In contrast, "	{...}" and "\B{...}" may or may not match at the
       beginning and end of the line, depending on the boundary type.
       These implement the Unicode default boundaries, specified in
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/> and
       <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/>.  The boundary types are:

       "	{gcb}" or "	{g}"
           This matches a Unicode "Grapheme Cluster Boundary".  (Actually
           Perl always uses the improved "extended" grapheme cluster").
           These are explained below under ""\X"".  In fact, "\X" is
           another way to get the same functionality.  It is equivalent to
           "/.+?	{gcb}/".  Use whichever is most convenient for your
           situation.

       "	{lb}"
           This matches according to the default Unicode Line Breaking
           Algorithm (<http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/>), as
           customized in that document (Example 7 of revision 35
           <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr14/tr14-35.html#Example7>)
           for better handling of numeric expressions.

           This is suitable for many purposes, but the Unicode::LineBreak
           module is available on CPAN that provides many more features,
           including customization.

       "	{sb}"
           This matches a Unicode "Sentence Boundary".  This is an aid to
           parsing natural language sentences.  It gives good, but
           imperfect results.  For example, it thinks that "Mr. Smith" is
           two sentences.  More details are at
           <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/>.  Note also that it
           thinks that anything matching "\R" (except form feed and
           vertical tab) is a sentence boundary.  "	{sb}" works with text
           designed for word-processors which wrap lines automatically for
           display, but hard-coded line boundaries are considered to be
           essentially the ends of text blocks (paragraphs really), and
           hence the ends of sententces.  "	{sb}" doesn't do well with
           text containing embedded newlines, like the source text of the
           document you are reading.  Such text needs to be preprocessed
           to get rid of the line separators before looking for sentence
           boundaries.  Some people view this as a bug in the Unicode
           standard, and this behavior is quite subject to change in
           future Perl versions.

       "	{wb}"
           This matches a Unicode "Word Boundary", but tailored to Perl
           expectations.  This gives better (though not perfect) results
           for natural language processing than plain "	" (without
           braces) does.  For example, it understands that apostrophes can
           be in the middle of words and that parentheses aren't (see the
           examples below).  More details are at
           <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/>.

           The current Unicode definition of a Word Boundary matches
           between every white space character.  Perl tailors this,
           starting in version 5.24, to generally not break up spans of
           white space, just as plain "	" has always functioned.  This
           allows "	{wb}" to be a drop-in replacement for "	", but with
           generally better results for natural language processing.  (The
           exception to this tailoring is when a span of white space is
           immediately followed by something like U+0303, COMBINING TILDE.
           If the final space character in the span is a horizontal white
           space, it is broken out so that it attaches instead to the
           combining character.  To be precise, if a span of white space
           that ends in a horizontal space has the character immediately
           following it have either of the Word Boundary property values
           "Extend" or "Format", the boundary between the final horizontal
           space character and the rest of the span matches "	{wb}".  In
           all other cases the boundary between two white space characters
           matches "\B{wb}".)

       It is important to realize when you use these Unicode boundaries,
       that you are taking a risk that a future version of Perl which
       contains a later version of the Unicode Standard will not work
       precisely the same way as it did when your code was written.  These
       rules are not considered stable and have been somewhat more subject
       to change than the rest of the Standard.  Unicode reserves the
       right to change them at will, and Perl reserves the right to update
       its implementation to Unicode's new rules.  In the past, some
       changes have been because new characters have been added to the
       Standard which have different characteristics than all previous
       characters, so new rules are formulated for handling them.  These
       should not cause any backward compatibility issues.  But some
       changes have changed the treatment of existing characters because
       the Unicode Technical Committee has decided that the change is
       warranted for whatever reason.  This could be to fix a bug, or
       because they think better results are obtained with the new rule.

       It is also important to realize that these are default boundary
       definitions, and that implementations may wish to tailor the
       results for particular purposes and locales.  For example, some
       languages, such as Japanese and Thai, require dictionary lookup to
       determine word boundaries.

       Mnemonic: boundary.

   Examples

     "cat"   =~ /\Acat/;     # Match.
     "cat"   =~ /cat\Z/;     # Match.
     "cat\n" =~ /cat\Z/;     # Match.
     "cat\n" =~ /cat\z/;     # No match.

     "cat"   =~ /	cat	/;   # Matches.
     "cats"  =~ /	cat	/;   # No match.
     "cat"   =~ /	cat\B/;   # No match.
     "cats"  =~ /	cat\B/;   # Match.

     while ("cat dog" =~ /(\w+)/g) {
         print $1;           # Prints 'catdog'
     }
     while ("cat dog" =~ /\G(\w+)/g) {
         print $1;           # Prints 'cat'
     }

     my $s = "He said, \"Is pi 3.14? (I'm not sure).\"";
     print join("|", $s =~ m/ ( .+? 	     ) /xg), "\n";
     print join("|", $s =~ m/ ( .+? 	{wb} ) /xg), "\n";
    prints
     He| |said|, "|Is| |pi| |3|.|14|? (|I|'|m| |not| |sure
     He| |said|,| |"|Is| |pi| |3.14|?| |(|I'm| |not| |sure|)|.|"

   Misc
   Here we document the backslash sequences that don't fall in one of the
   categories above. These are:

   \K  This appeared in perl 5.10.0. Anything matched left of "\K" is not
       included in $&, and will not be replaced if the pattern is used in
       a substitution. This lets you write "s/PAT1 \K PAT2/REPL/x" instead
       of "s/(PAT1) PAT2/${1}REPL/x" or "s/(?<=PAT1) PAT2/REPL/x".

       Mnemonic: Keep.

   \N  This feature, available starting in v5.12,  matches any character
       that is not a newline.  It is a short-hand for writing "[^\n]", and
       is identical to the "." metasymbol, except under the "/s" flag,
       which changes the meaning of ".", but not "\N".

       Note that "\N{...}" can mean a named or numbered character .

       Mnemonic: Complement of \n.

   \R  "\R" matches a generic newline; that is, anything considered a
       linebreak sequence by Unicode. This includes all characters matched
       by "\v" (vertical whitespace), and the multi character sequence
       "\x0D\x0A" (carriage return followed by a line feed, sometimes
       called the network newline; it's the end of line sequence used in
       Microsoft text files opened in binary mode). "\R" is equivalent to
       "(?>\x0D\x0A|\v)".  (The reason it doesn't backtrack is that the
       sequence is considered inseparable.  That means that

        "\x0D\x0A" =~ /^\R\x0A$/   # No match

       fails, because the "\R" matches the entire string, and won't
       backtrack to match just the "\x0D".)  Since "\R" can match a
       sequence of more than one character, it cannot be put inside a
       bracketed character class; "/[\R]/" is an error; use "\v" instead.
       "\R" was introduced in perl 5.10.0.

       Note that this does not respect any locale that might be in effect;
       it matches according to the platform's native character set.

       Mnemonic: none really. "\R" was picked because PCRE already uses
       "\R", and more importantly because Unicode recommends such a
       regular expression metacharacter, and suggests "\R" as its
       notation.

   \X  This matches a Unicode extended grapheme cluster.

       "\X" matches quite well what normal (non-Unicode-programmer) usage
       would consider a single character.  As an example, consider a G
       with some sort of diacritic mark, such as an arrow.  There is no
       such single character in Unicode, but one can be composed by using
       a G followed by a Unicode "COMBINING UPWARDS ARROW BELOW", and
       would be displayed by Unicode-aware software as if it were a single
       character.

       The match is greedy and non-backtracking, so that the cluster is
       never broken up into smaller components.

       See also "	{gcb}".

       Mnemonic: eXtended Unicode character.

   Examples

    $str =~ s/foo\Kbar/baz/g; # Change any 'bar' following a 'foo' to 'baz'
    $str =~ s/(.)\K\g1//g;    # Delete duplicated characters.

    "\n"   =~ /^\R$/;         # Match, \n   is a generic newline.
    "\r"   =~ /^\R$/;         # Match, \r   is a generic newline.
    "\r\n" =~ /^\R$/;         # Match, \r\n is a generic newline.

    "P\x{307}" =~ /^\X$/     # \X matches a P with a dot above.





Opportunity


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Education


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Linux Manual Pages - A man or manual page is a form of software documentation found on Linux/Unix operating systems. Topics covered include computer programs (including library and system calls), formal standards and conventions, and even abstract concepts.