Another useful thing would be able to match a certain number of characters that matched a certain criteria.
There are two types of searches you can do when you're dealing with quantifiers: greedy or nongreedy, or in
other terms maximal, and minimal. A maximal or greedy search tries to match as many characters as it can
while still returning a true value. So if we were looking for 1 to 4 b's in a row and had
a string with 3 b's in a row we would match the 3 b's. If it was a minimal or nongreedy search only
the first b would be matched.
Here's a table that sums up quantifiers.
Obviously Perl needs to know what these quantifiers are referring to. The quantifier is associated with the character directly to its left unless parentheses are used for grouping.
Here's a table that sums up quantifiers.
Greedy | Nongreedy | Allowed numbers for a match |
? | ?? | 0 or 1 time |
+ | +? | 1 or more times |
* | *? | 0 or more times |
{i} | {i}? | exactly i times |
{i,} | {i,}? | i or more times |
{i,j} | {i,j}? | at lease i times and at most j times |
Obviously Perl needs to know what these quantifiers are referring to. The quantifier is associated with the character directly to its left unless parentheses are used for grouping.
Onto Character Class Abbreviations/b{3}/ #matches three b's /(ha){3}/ #matches hahaha
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