Perl Best Practices

Chapter 12. Regular Expressions

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think: "I know, I'll use regular expressions".  Now they have two problems.

—Jamie Zawinski

Regular expressions are one of the signature features of Perl, providing it with most of the practical extraction facilities for which it is famous. Many of those who are new to Perl (and many who aren't so new) approach regexes with mistrust, trepidation, or outright fear.

And with some justification. Regexes are specified in a compact and sometimes baroque syntax that is, all by itself, responsible for much of Perl's "executable line noise" reputation. Moreover, in the right hands, patterns are capable of performing mystifying feats of text recognition, analysis, transformation, and computation^[62].

It's no wonder they scare so many otherwise stalwart Perl hackers.

And no surprise that they also figure heavily in many suboptimal programming practices, especially of the "cut-and-paste" variety. Or, more often, of the "cut-and-paste-and-modify-slightly-and-oh-now-it-doesn't-work-at-all-so-let's-modify-it-some-more-and-see-if-that-helps-no-it-didn't-but-we're-committed-now-so-maybe-if-we-change-that-bit-instead-hmmmm-that's-closer-but-still-not-quite-right-maybe-if-I-made-that-third-repetition-non-greedy-instead-oops-now-it's-back-to-not-matching-at-all-perhaps-I-should-just-post-it-to-PerlMonks.org-and-see-if-they-know-what's-wrong" variety.

Yet the secret to taming regular expressions is remarkably ...