Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Staying in Control

As any good manager knows, you shouldn’t micromanage your employees. Just tell them what you want, and let them figure out the best way of doing it. Similarly, it’s often best to think of a regular expression as a kind of specification: “Here’s what I want; go find a string that fits the bill.”

On the other hand, the best managers also understand the job their employees are trying to do. The same is true of pattern matching in Perl. The more thoroughly you understand how Perl goes about the task of matching any particular pattern, the more wisely you’ll be able to make use of Perl’s pattern-matching capabilities.

One of the most important things to understand about Perl’s pattern matching is when not to use it.