Over the years programming languages have incorporated features for regular expressions. Some, such as Javascript, have added syntax specifically to support regular expressions. Others, such as PHP, have just reused their native string type and utilize special subroutines to parse strings as regular expressions. But one thing almost all of them have in common is that they have mimicked the extended regular expression syntax of Perl.
Of course, Perl wasn't the first programming language to have support for regular expressions. But it did make them popular. Perl has been so successful as a text processing and glue language and regular expressions so well interwoven into the language that anyone who uses Perl almost has to learn regular expressions. Also, by applying some of Perl's philosophy to regular expressions, common usages became easy and complex usages became possible. Here are just a few features that resulted: character class shortcuts, annotated regular expressions, ability to match unicode properties, zero-width assertions, independant subexpressions, and code execution inside of a regular expression.
Unfortunately, as the regular expressioning public put more demand on Perl's regular expression syntax, it accumulated some crufty items-- little inconsistencies that were to maintain backward compatibility or were introduced because they were needed, but before they were fully thought out. In designing Perl 6, Larry Wall not only looked at the syntax and semantics of Perl proper, but he also took a hard look at the sub-language that is regular expressions and refactored it into something that makes better sense.
In this article I'm going to give an introduction to Perl 6 regex (we call them "regex" to maintain the historical association with regular expressions though they've strayed quite far from the mathematical sense of regular languages). I'll point out differences from Perl 5 syntax but no knowledge of Perl 5's regular expression syntax should be necessary to understand this document. If you're a Perl 5 geek, you may be bored for a while, but read anyway so that you can pick up the syntactic and semantic differences.
Firstly, let's get some small syntactic things out of the way. In Perl 6, as in other implementations, regex are typically delimited by slashes (aka, leaning toothpicks), so a typical regex to match the string "abc" would look like this:
/abc/
A regex is also sometimes called a "pattern" because we're looking for a portion of a string that looks like the strings that the regex describes. Regex are also sometimes called "rules" because they describe the conditions under which the string may match. But what string are we looking in? As in Perl 5, Perl 6 applies the regex to a variable called $_ if we haven't explicitly specified a variable to match against. For now I'm going to continue assuming that our string is in $_ in my examples. Later I'll show you how to specify a different string to match against.
$_
So, the above regex tries to find the pattern "abc" in the string $_. If the pattern appears in the string, the regex returns a true value to indicate that it matched successfully, otherwise it returns a false value. It's important to note that the pattern may appear anywhere in the string. So, for instance, if $_ contained "fooabcbar", the above pattern will sucessfully match and the regex will return a true value. Here are some more strings that would successfully match against the regex:
abcgoobltygook now I know my abcs abc babcock
Now, if all you can do is match literal strings, regexes wouldn't be so useful would they? Some characters rather than taken literally are so- called metacharacters that have special meaning in a regex. In Perl 6, any non-alphanumeric character is considered a metacharacter by default. That is, alphabetic and numeric characters match themselves and any other character may not match itself because it may have special meaning. (For the purposes of metasyntax, the underscore is considered alphanumeric.)
Currently not all metacharacters actually have a special meaning but many do and in order to keep things simple, Perl 6 chooses to designate all non-alphanumeric characters as metasyntactic. However, there's an "escape mechanism" that lets you treat metacharacters as themselves (literally), and alphanumeric characters as metasyntactic. By prefixing an alphanumeric character with a backslash (\) it becomes a metacharacter and is special. By the same token, prefixing a non- alphanumeric character with a backslash removes its metasyntactic nature and it becomes literal.
\
So, for example, a common metasyntactic character found in regular expressions is a period (., sometimes just called a "dot") and it matches any character. Thus,
.
/f..d/
will match any four character sequence that starts with an "f" and ends with a "d". All of the following strings match this pattern:
my name is fred # matched "fred" I need food, now! # matched "food" those guys are turf idols # matched "f id" shift down a gear # matched "ft d"
If you want to actually match a period you can escape it like so:
/foo\./ # matches "foo."
Similarly, the letter "t" in a regular expression matches itself (i.e., an occurence of the letter "t"). But, with a backslash immediately preceding the "t", it takes on its metasyntactic meaning of a tab character. For example:
/tall/ # matches the string "tall" /\tall/ # matches a tab character, followed by "all"
Another way to match character sequences that are to be taken literally is to enclose them in quotes:
/'foo.'/ # matches "foo." /"foo."/ # same
In these cases, the quotes are metasyntactic delimiters that mean "match the characters in between literally".
The most important metasyntactic characters in regex are whitespace (typically space characters, but sometimes tabs and other "invisible" characters). Because regular expressions tend towards high character density, they can often be difficult to read. In Perl 6 regex, you may use whitespace to separate parts of your regex to make it easier to read. The whitespace is ignored by the regex engine. To match literal space characters, just as with other metasyntax, you may precede the space with a backslash or enclose the space in quotes.
In future examples I will occasionally show a given regex in its spaced form. The spaced form is preferable when writing regex as it makes them easier to read later, and will be used from now on.
Three other important metacharacters are what are called quantifiers. These characters allow you to specify repetition; that a character or group of characters may be matched multiple times.
quantifier matches * the preceding thing zero or more times + the preceding thing one or more times ? the preceding thing zero or one time
Examples:
/ fo* / # will match "f", "fo", "foo", "fooo", etc. / fo+ / # will match "fo", "foo", "fooo", "foooo", etc. / fo? / # will only match "f" or "fo"
Note that in the above examples the quantifier is only applied to the preceding character. If you need to match a group of characters repeatedly, you have to use one of the several grouping mechanisms in Perl 6 regex (see Grouping below).
There is another character sequence sometimes called the universal quantifier that allows you to prescribe a specific number of times a particular pattern may match. To use the universal quantifier, you use two * characters followed by a number or a range like so:
*
/ fo ** 3 / # matches only "fooo" / fo ** 3..5 / # matches one of "fooo", "foooo", or "fooooo"
You may also specify a closure after the **, but that is beyond the scope of this introduction to explain. See the references given at the end of this article for more reading.
**
We've seen how to match a specific character at a given location by putting that character in the regex and we've seen how to match any character at a specific location by putting a dot in the regex, but sometimes you want to match a specific set of characters at a given position. The mechism to do this in regex is called a "character class". Character classes are designated by <[]> with the specific characters listed inside the brackets. For instance,
<[]>
/ foo <[dlt]> / # matches "food", "fool" or "foot"
The sequence <[dlt]> represents any one of the characters "d", "l", or "t". You can also specify a set of contiguous characters to match using a range like so:
<[dlt]>
/ <[ a..d ]> / # matches one of "a", "b", "c", or "d"
You can also mix ranges and specific characters:
/<[ a..d xyz ]>/ # matches one of "a","b","c","d","x","y", or "z" /<[ xyz a..d ]>/ # same /<[ x..z a..d ]>/ # same
Some character classes are so useful that they have their own designated short-cuts. All of the character class short-cuts make use of alphabetic characters that have been given a metasyntactic meaning by prefixing the character with a back slash. Here's a table of the short-cuts:
short-cut matches \w word characters (alphabetics, numerics, and underscore) \W non-word characters \d digits \D non-digits \s whitespace characters \S non-whitespace characters \t tab character \T anything but a tab character \n newline sequence \N anything I<but> a newline sequence \r carriage return character \R anything but carriage return character \f form feed character \F anything but form feed character \h horizontal whitespace \H anything but horizontal whitespace \v vertical whitespace \V anything but vertical whitespace
You may notice some regularity in this table. For every character class short-cut of the form \<lower case letter> the anti-class is always \<corresponding upper case letter>. (The old non-newline meaning of . maps neatly to the new \N sequence.)
\<lower case letter>
\<corresponding upper case letter>
\N
Character classes bear a remarkable resemblance to sets. In fact, you can "add" and "subtract" character classes much like you would sets:
/<[a..z] - [aeiou]>/ # Only match a consonant /<[asdfg] + [hjkl;]> +/ # Only match a sequence of characters that can # be made from home row keys.
There are several ways to group a portion of a regex. We saw one such way earlier in our discussion of literals: surround the characters with quotes. Quoting does two things, it forces all of the characters between the quotes to be treated literally and it groups the string of characters together into a quantifiable unit.
/ 'foo.' * / # will match "foo.", "foo.foo.", "foo.foo.foo.", etc.
Another way to create a quantifiable unit is to use square brackets ([]). Square brackets delimit a portion of the regex that may be treated as a whole. The text in between the brackets is just another regex.
[]
/ f[ oo ]* / # will match "f", "foo", "foooo", "foooooo", etc. / a[ bc* d ]? / # will match "a", "abd", "abcd", "abccd", "abcccd", etc.
Yet another way to group a portion of a regex to be treated as a unit is to use round brackets (()). These are identical to square brackets as far as grouping goes, but additionally, the portion of the string that is matched by the regex inside the round brackets is also saved somewhere and may be accessed later in a variety of ways. Round brackets are said to be "capturing brackets" because of this property. The following table shows some examples of what would be captured if the given regex matched certain portions of a string:
()
regex matched captured /f(oo)*/ "f" "" # the empty string "foo" "oo" "foooo" "oooo" /a(bc*d)?/ "a" "" # the empty string "abd" "bd" "abcd" "bcd" "abccd" "bccd"
Both round and square brackets delimit a portion of the regex. This portion of the regex is called a "subpattern". The portion of the string that matches a subpattern can be referenced and accessed individually. We'll talk more about capturing and where the captured portion of the string is stored later.
There are a couple of other useful concepts in regex called "alternation" and "conjunction". Alternation is the idea that at a given location in a string, there are alternatives to what may be matched. Conjunction is the idea that at a given location in a string, there are multiple portions of a regex that must match exactly the same section of the string.
Alternation is designated in regex by either a single vertical bar (|) or a double vertical bar (||). While each allows you to specify alternatives, how they process those alternatives is different.
|
||
A single vertical bar does "longest token" matching on the alternations with no inherent order as to which alternative is tried first. So, for instance, if we were matching the string "football", the following regex
/ f | fo | foo /
would match "foo" since that's the longest matching portion of the regex in the alternation. But the regular expression engine may have tried them all before it discovered "foo", or perhaps "foo" was the first and only alternative tried. It is completely up to the regex engine implementation as to how the alternatives are tried.
Had the regex been
/ f | fo | fo.*l | foo /
then the third item in the alternation would be matched since fo.*l will match the entire string. Again, which order the alternatives are tried is unspecified.
fo.*l
A double vertical bar (||) will match each alternative in a left-to- right manner. That is, the regex
/ f || fo || foo /
will first try to match "f", and then (if it failed to match "f") try to match "fo", and finally it will try to match "foo". So, were the above regex applied to the string "football" as before, the first alternative ("f") would match. This behavior is exactly the same as traditional implementations of alternation in other backtracking regular expression engines.
Which alternative matches and the order in which the alternatives are tried becomes particularly important when each alternative has side effects (such as setting a variable or calling a subroutine). We'll talk more about that later.
Similar to alternations, conjunctions in regex are designated by either a single ampersand (&) or a double ampersand (&&). In both forms, all of the conjuncted terms must match the exact same portion of the string they are being matched against. But, as with alternation, the single- ampersand version matches the subpatterns in some unspecified order while the double ampersand version of conjunctions will try each conjuncted portion of the regex in a left-to-right manner.
&
&&
For an example, if the following regex were applied to the string "blah",
/ <[a..z]>+ & [ ... ] / # matches "bla"
it would match the string "bla" because the subpattern on the right of the ampersand matches exactly 3 characters and the subpattern on the left matches any sequence of lower case letters. By comparison, had the regex been (still applied to the string "blah"):
/ <[a..z]>+ && [ ... ] /
It still would match "bla" but how it arrives at that match is slightly different. First, the left hand side of the && would match as much as it possibly can (since * is greedy), then the right hand side would match its 3 characters. Since the two sides then do not match the exact same portion of the string, the regex engine is said to "backtrack" and try the left hand side with one fewer character before trying to match the right hand side again. This continues until both sides match the exact same portion of the string or until it can be determined that no such match is possible.
Backtracking has the potential to happen whenever there is a decision point in a regex. An alternation creates a decision point with several alternatives; a quantifier creates a decision point where a given portion of a regex may match one more or one fewer times. Backtracking is caused by the regex engine's attempt to satisfy an overall match. For instance, when matching the following regex against the string "footbag"
/ [ foot || base || hand ] ball /
the regex engine will match "foot" and then attempt to match "ball" when it realizes that "ball" will not match, it backtracks to the point where it matched "foot" and tries to match the next alternative at that point (in this case, "base"). When that fails to match, the regex engine will try to match the next alternative, and so forth until either one of the alternatives matches or they are all exhausted.
Now, as a human walking through the same sequence of steps that the regex goes through, I can tell right away that since foot was matched, that neither base nor hand will match. But the regex engine may not know this. (For this simple example, the regex engine can probably figure out that the alternatives are mutually exclusive. If that bothers you, imagine that they are instead complicated expressions rather than simple strings) As the match for "ball" repeatedly fails, the regex engine repeatedly backtracks and tries again.
foot
base
hand
However, Perl 6 provides a way to tell the regex engine when to give up. A colon in the regex causes Perl to not retry the preceding "atom". In regex parlance, an atom is anything that is matched as a unit; a group is an atom, a single character may be an atom, etc. So, in the above example, if I wanted to tell the regex engine to not try the other alternatives once one of them matched (because I, as the person writing the regex, know that they are all mutually exclusive), I simply follow the group with a colon like so:
/ [ foot || base || hand ] : ball /
As soon as one of the alternatives match, the regex engine will move past the colon and try to match ball. When it fails to match ball, ordinarily it would backtrack to try other possibilities. But now the colon acts as a stopping point that says, "don't bother backtracking because nothing else will match" and so the regex engine will fail that portion of the regex immediately rather than trying all of the other alternatives. It's important to note that the colon does not necessarily cause the entire regex to fail once it is backtracked over, but only the atom to which it is applied. If not matching that atom means that the entire regex won't match, then, of course, the entire regex will fail.
ball
Perl 6 has other forms of backtracking control. A double colon will cause its enclosing group to fail if backtracked over. A triple colon will cause the entire regex to fail. For more information on these see "S05:Backtracking control".
As the regular expression engine processes a string to see if it matches a given pattern, it keeps a marker to denote how much of the string it has processed so far. (When this marker moves backwards, the regex engine is backtracking) As the marker moves along the string, it is said to "consume" the string. Sometimes you want to match without consuming any of the input string or match between characters (say the transition from an alphabetic character to a numeric character or only at the beginning of the string). This idea of matching without consuming is called a zero-width assertion.
Perl 6 provides some metacharacters that denote handy zero-width assertions.
^ only matches at the beginning of the string $ only matches at the end of the string ^^ matches at the beginning of any line within the string $$ matches at the end of any line within the string << A word boundary, but only matches the transition from non-word character to word character (i.e., the left-hand side of a word) >> A word boundary, but only matches the transition from word character to non-word character (i.e., the right-hand side of a word)
Here are some example patterns and the portion(s) of the string that would match if each pattern were applied repeatedly to the entire string "the quick\nbrown fox\njumped over\nthe lazy\ndog" ("\n" denotes a new line sequence within the string (i.e. "\n" terminates each line))
Pattern Matches / ^the \s+ \w+ / "the quick" / \w+ $ / "dog" / ^^ \w+ / "the", "brown", "jumped", "the", and "dog" / \w+ $$ / "quick", "fox", "over", "lazy", and "dog" / << o\w+ / "over" / o \w+ >> / "own", "over", "og"
In order for the patterns that would match multiple portions of the string to actually match those substrings, there needs to be some way to tell the regex engine to continue matching from where the last match left off. See modifiers below.
When a regex successfully matches a portion of a string it returns a Match object. In a boolean context the Match object evaluates to true. When using capturing brackets (parentheses), the part of the string that is captured is placed in the Match object and can be accessed in a number of ways.
The Match object itself is called $/. The substring captured by the first set of parentheses is placed in $/[0], the substring captured by the second set of parentheses is placed in $/[1] and so forth. There is a short-hand way to access these elements of the Match object that will be familiar (yet slightly different) to people who have used regular expression engines similar to Perl 5. The short-hand for $/[0],$/[1],$/[2], etc. are the special variables $0, $1, $2, etc. The big difference from other regular expression engines is that the numbering starts with 0 rather than 1. Starting from 0 was chosen to mimic the array indices of the match object.
$/
$/[0]
$/[1]
Unlike Perl 5, a variable placed inside a regex does not automatically interpolate the value of the variable. What happens with the variable depends on context (this is perl after all :-). An "unadorned" variable will interpolate as a literal string to match if it's a scalar, or as an alternation of literal strings to match if it's an array or hash (not strictly true, but true enough for now). So, given the following declarations:
my $foo = "ab*c"; my @bar = < one two three >;
The regex:
/ $foo @bar /
matches exactly as if you had written
/ 'ab*c' [ one | two | three ] /
Sometimes a variable inside of a regex is actually used to affect a named capture of a specific portion of the string instead of (or even in addition to) storing the captured portion in $0, $1, $2, etc. For instance:
/ $<foo>:=[ <[A-Z]+[0-9]>**4 ] /
if the group matches, the result is placed in $/<$foo>. As with numeric captures, there is a short-hand syntax for accessing a named portion of a Match object: $<foo>
$/<$foo>
$<foo>
Until now we've talked primarily about the pattern matching syntax itself, but how do we apply these rules to a string other than $_? We use the smart match operator ~~. This operator is called "smart match" because it does quite a bit more than just apply regular expressions to strings, but for now we're just going to focus on that one aspect of the smart match operator. So to match a regular expression against the string contained in a variable called $foo, we'd do this:
~~
$foo
$foo ~~ / <regex here> /;
There's a more general syntax that allows the author to choose different delimiters if your regular expression happens to match the / character and you don't feel like writing \/ so much:
/
\/
$foo ~~ m/ <regex here> /; $foo ~~ m! <regex here> !; # different delimiter
The more general syntax also gives us a convienent place to put modifiers that will affect the regular expression as a whole. For instance, there is an ignorecase modifier that causes the RE engine to be agnostic towards case distinctions in alphabetic characters. There's also a short-hand for this modifier for those times when ignorecase is too much to type out.
ignorecase
$foo ~~ m :ignorecase/ foo /; # will match "foo", "FOO", "fOo", etc. $foo ~~ m :i/ foo /; # same
Perl 6 predefines several of these modifiers (for a complete list, see S05):
modifier short-hand meaning :ignorecase :i Ignore case distinctions :basechar :b Ignore accents and other marks :sigspace :s whitespace in pattern matches whitespace in string :global :g matches as many times as possible :continue :c Continue matching from where previous match left off :pos :p Just like :c but pattern is anchored where the previous match left off :ratchet Don't do any backtracking :bytes dot matches bytes :codes dot matches codepoints :graphs dot matches language-independent graphemes :chars dot matches "characters" at current Unicode level :Perl5 :P5 use perl 5 regex syntax
There are two other modifiers for matching a pattern some number of times or only matching, say, the third time we see a pattern in a string. These modifiers are a little strange in that their short-hand forms consist of a number followed by some text:
modifier short-hand meaning :x() :1x,:4x,:12x match some number of times :nth() :1st,:2nd,:3rd,:4th match only the Nth occurance
Here are some examples to illustrate these modifiers:
$_ = "foo bar baz blat"; m :3x/ a / # matches the "a" characters in each word m :nth(3)/ \w+ / # matches "baz"
Some of these modifiers may also be placed inside the regular expression and their effect is scoped until the end of the innermost enclosing bracketing construct or the end of the pattern.
/ a [ :i foo ] z/ # matches "afooz", "aFOOz", "aFooz", "afOoz", etc.
The :sigspace modifier is quite useful. If you're unsure of the amount of whitespace between tokens or can't guarantee a certain number of spaces, you may be inclined to use \s* or \s+ often in your regex. However, it can get tedious typing \s+ so often and it tends to visually detract from the parts you're really interested in matching. Thus Perl 6 regex provides the :sigspace modifier so that whitespace in your pattern matches whitespace in your string. This is so useful that Perl provides a nice short-cut for it.
\s*
\s+
/\s*One\s+small\s+step\s*/ # yuck m:sigspace/One small step/ # much better mm/One small step/ # even better!
Earlier we talked about "zero-width assertions" that allow us to match "in between" characters. But we've also talked about other kinds of assertions, only we didn't call them that. Whever you write a regex to match anything, you're asserting something about what a successful match should look like. So, for instance, in the following regex,
/ \w+ '(' [ \w+ ',' ]* [ \w+ ]? ')' /
we are asserting that, for a string to match, it must contain a sequence of word characters followed by a ( followed by zero or more word character sequences optionally terminated with a comma and finally, a ). Each of the "tokens" is an assertion about what must match for the entire regex to match. So, \w is an assertion that a word character must match, '(' is an assertion that an open parenthesis must match, and so forth. (There are 6 assertions in the above regex)
(
)
\w
'('
However, the regex would make more sense if we could give the individual pieces meaningful names. For instance, if we could write the above regex like so:
/ <function_name> '(' [ <parameter> ',' ]* <parameter>? ')' /
you might have a better idea what those \w+ sequences were for. Lucky for us, Perl 6 provides just such a mechanism.
\w+
The syntax for declaring a named regex is:
regex identifier { \w+ }
Once declared, we can use this in another regex like so:
/ <identifier> /
and it is identical to
/ \w+ /
with an important and useful exception: the portion of the string that matches can also be accessed as $/<identifier >.
$/<identifier
Perl 6 predeclares several useful named regex (See S05 for a complete list):
<alpha> a single alphabetic character <digit> a single numeric character <ident> an "identifier" <sp> a single space character <ws> an arbitrary amount of whitespace <dot> a period (same as '.') <lt> a less-than character (same as '<') <gt> a greater-than character (same as '>') <null> matches nothing (useful in alternations that may be empty)
You may have noticed that a regex declaration looks very similar to a subroutine declaration. Indeed, regex are very much like subroutines. They may even have parameters. There are two named regex that are used to obtain zero-width look-ahead and look-behind. The parameter passed to these named regex may be another regex:
regex
<before ...> Zero-width look ahead for ... <after ...> Zero-width look behind for ...
An example:
/ foo <before \d+> / # only matches on "foo" followed # immediately by some digits
Since these assertions are zero-width, the "pointer" that keeps track of how much of the string has been consumed will point just after the "foo" portion of the string on successful match so that the digits can be processed by other means if necessary.
By declaring named regex like this you can build up a whole library of regex that match some special purpose language. In fact, Perl 6 lets you group your regex under a common name by declaring that all of your regex belong to the same "grammar".
grammar Calc; regex expr { <term> '*' <expr> | <term> '/' <expr> | <term> } regex term { <factor> '+' <term> | <factor> '-' <term> | <factor> } regex factor { <digit>+ | '(' <expr> ')' }
The grammar declaration must appear at the beginning of the file and is in effect until the end of file. To explicitly declare the scope of the grammar, enclose the regex in curly braces like so:
grammar Calc { regex expr { ... } regex term { ... } regex factor { ... } }
To match strings that belong to this grammar, the named regex must be fully qualified:
"3+5*2" ~~ / <Calc.expr> /;
Perl 6 also has some shortcuts for specifying common and useful defaults to the regex engine. If, instead of using the regex keyword, you use token, Perl 6 will automatically turn on the :ratchet modifier for the duration of the regex. The idea being that once you've matched a "token" you're not likely to want to backtrack into it.
token
:ratchet
Also, if you use rule instead of regex, Perl 6 will turn on both of the :ratchet and :sigspace modifiers.
rule
:sigspace
Here's the Calc grammar above, rewritten to use these syntactic shortcuts:
Calc
grammar Calc; rule expr { <term> '*' <expr> | <term> '/' <expr> | <term> } rule term { <factor> '+' <term> | <factor> '-' <term> | <factor> } token factor { <digit>+ | '(' <expr> ')' }
There's not much difference is there? But it makes a big difference in what gets parsed. The original grammar did not have any provisions for matching whitespace, so any whitespace in the string would cause the pattern to fail. A string like "3 + 5 * 7" would not be matched by the original grammar. Now, because whitespace in the pattern is parsed as whitespace in the string, that string will parse successfully.
Throughout this article I've been talking about regex as they apply to very ASCII-like strings, however Perl 6 regex are not restricted by ASCII. Perl 6 regex can be applied to any string of Unicode characters and, in fact, are written in Unicode by default.
Moreover, Perl 6 regex can be applied to things that are not strings but can be made to look like strings. For instance, they can be applied to a filehandle (which can represent itself as a stream of bytes/characters/whatever). Even stranger, is that regex can be applied to an array of objects. See "S05:Matching against non-strings".
Well, that's about it for this introduction to Perl 6 regex. I've run out of steam. There are tons of features that I've left out since this is just an introduction. A few that come to mind are:
match object polymorphism
Captured portions of the regex can be accessed as strings, but they can also be accessed in other ways: as a match object, as an array (if the subpattern is quantified), as a hash, etc.
Perl code in regex
Curly braces in a regex allow for execution of arbitrary perl code as the regex is matched.
quantifier enhancement
The universal quantifier can be used to match more than just some number of times. If the thing on the RHS of the ** is a regex, then that is taken as the pattern to match as the separator between items that match the LHS. (e.g., <ident>**',' will match a series of identifiers separated by comma characters)
Be sure to read the references given below for a more detailed explanation of the features mentioned in this article.
If you want to read more about Perl 6 regex, see the official Perl 6 documentation at http://perlcabal.org/syn/S05.html. There are also some historical documents at http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/apo/A05.html and http://dev.perl.org/perl6/doc/design/exe/E05.html that may give you a feel for things. If you're really interested in learning more but feel you need to interact with people try the mailing list at perl6-language@perl.org or log on to a freenode IRC server and drop by #perl6.
Jonathan Scott Duff is an Information Technology Research Manager at the Conrad Blucher Institute for Surveying and Science on the campus of Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. He has a beautiful wife and 4 lovely children. When not working or spending time with his family, Scott tries to keep up with Parrot and Perl 6 development. Sometimes he can be found on IRC as PerlJam in one of the perl-related channels. But if you really want to get in touch with him, the best way is via email: duff@pobox.com
Copyright 2007-2009 Jonathan Scott Duff
To install Perl6::Doc, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Perl6::Doc
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Perl6::Doc
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.