Perl 6 Deep Dive

Modifying regexes with adverbs

Adverbs are regex modifiers. They are colon-prefix letters that change the behavior of regexes.

Adverbs exist in two forms—short and long—and appear in front of a regex, for example:

say 'OK' if 'ABCD' ~~ m:i/ abcd /;

Notice, that when an adverb is applied to the whole regex as in this example, m or rx is needed. Alternatively, an adverb can be put inside the regex. In this case, it starts its action from the position where it appeared. This is demonstrated in the examples in the next section about the :i adverb.

The following table lists all the adverbs:

Short form	Long form	Description
:i	:ignorecase	Match letters are case-insensitive
:s	:sigspace	Whitespacess are significant
:p(N)	:pos(N)	Start at ...