Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Backreferences

We mentioned earlier that you can use parentheses to group things for quantifiers, but you can also use parentheses to remember bits and pieces of what you matched. A pair of parentheses around a part of a regular expression causes whatever was matched by that part to be remembered for later use. It doesn’t change what the part matches, so /\d+/ and /(\d+)/ will still match as many digits as possible, but in the latter case they will be remembered in a special variable to be backreferenced later.

How you refer back to the remembered part of the string depends on where you want to do it from. Within the same regular expression, you use a backslash followed by an integer. The integer corresponding to a given pair of parentheses is determined by counting left parentheses from the beginning of the pattern, starting with one. So, for example, to match something similar to an HTML tag like “<B>Bold</B>”, you might use /<(.*?)>.*?<\/\1>/. This forces the two parts of the pattern to match the exact same string, such as the “B” in this example.

Outside the regular expression itself, such as in the replacement part of a substitution, you use a $ followed by an integer; that is, a normal scalar variable named by the integer. So if you wanted to swap the first two words of a string, for example, you could use:

s/(\S+)\s+(\S+)/$2 $1/

The right side of the substitution (between the second and third slashes) is mostly just a funny kind of double-quoted string, which is why you can interpolate ...