Effective Perl Programming: Ways to Write Better, More Idiomatic Perl, Second Edition

3. Regular Expressions

Perl’s regular expressions are a language unto themselves, and that language seems almost as complex as Perl, perhaps even more so.

You don’t have to use everything, but there are some features of regular expressions that will make your life much easier. This chapter shows you some of their more-popular features.

Although Perl’s regular-expression engine contains many optimizations for efficiency, it’s possible—and easy at times—to write matches and substitutions that run much more slowly than they should.

Efficiency may not always be your primary objective. In fact, efficiency should rarely be your primary objective in software development. Generally, a programmer’s first priority should be to develop adequate, robust, ...