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Re: perlrebackslash

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From:
H.Merijn Brand
Date:
April 12, 2007 07:18
Subject:
Re: perlrebackslash
Message ID:
20070412161657.39717b47@pc09
On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 15:23:12 +0200, Abigail <abigail@abigail.be> wrote:

> 
> Following last months document about RE character classes, here's a
> document about the backslash.

Nice reading ...

> =head2 The backslash
> 
> In a regular expression, the backslash can perform one of two tasks:
> it either takes away the special meaning of the character following it
> (for instance, C<\|> matches a vertical bar, it's not an alternation),
> or it is the start of a backslash or escape sequence.
> 
> The rules determining what it is are quite simple: if the character
> following the backslash is a punctuation (non-word) character (that is,
> anything that is not a letter, digit or underscore), then the backslash

  [0-9A-Za-z_], or are unicode letters allowed?

> just takes away the special meaning (if any) of the character following
> it.
> 
> If the character following the backslash is a letter or a digit, then the

  [0-9A-Za-z]

> sequence may be special; if so, it's listed below. A few letters have not
> been used yet, and escaping them with a backslash is safe for now, but a
> future version of Perl may assign a special meaning to it. However, if you
> have warnings turned on, Perl will issue a warning if you use such a sequence.
> [1].

/me now is intrigued by what \_ would mean.

pc09:/home/merijn 103 > perl -wle'print"\_"'
_
pc09:/home/merijn 104 > perl -wle'print qr/\_/'
(?-xism:_)
pc09:/home/merijn 105 >

So, the start of this paragraph should include the underscore?


-- 
H.Merijn Brand         Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/)
using & porting perl 5.6.2, 5.8.x, 5.9.x   on HP-UX 10.20, 11.00, 11.11,
& 11.23, SuSE 10.0 & 10.2, AIX 4.3 & 5.2, and Cygwin. http://qa.perl.org
http://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/            http://www.test-smoke.org
                        http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/

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