I always used a masonry analogy: you first start building the roof ^ and only at the end you get paid $

Now that I see it it can be semplified as: for any work you do money come as last

L*

It was exactly what I was searching for! Thank you so much, this is very helpful.

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start building the roof ^ and only at the end you get paid $

That's great and ^ certainly is the roof, while $ to me looks like a fishing hook, down in the murky waters :-)

Edited to add: ...the fishing hook of course marks the end of the line, fishing line, yes.

Cheers, Sören

Créateur des bugs mobiles - let loose once, run everywhere.
(hooked on the Perl Programming language)

Since nobody has mentioned it yet, you can just use the synonyms of \A for the start and \Z for the end. That's about as intuitive as you can get, I would think. The only difference comes if you use the /m modifier. See perlre for the details.

I like this one, but I have to admit I would be afraid it could confuse later readers, assuming it is less common than the ^/$ form?

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I'm pretty sure that usage of \A and \Z is less common than usage of ^ and $. But is usage of \A and \Z also less common than confusion of ^ and $? Probably not.

If you want to keep other folks in their comfort zone, stick to ^ and $ and learn which is which. If you are just using your own regexen day-to-day on the CLI then use whatever makes you more comfortable.

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Perl regexes allow variable interpolation and a final $ is taken as a meta for end-of-line

• /^\Q$string$/ tests $_ eq $string

edit

Otherwise, what would /$var/ be supposed to match?

• interpolation of $var as regex? (that's what's happening)
• literal characters "var" at start-of-line? (nope)

Very interesting, thanks. Unfortunately, you can see I totally miss this kind of logic.

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> Unfortunately, you can see I totally miss this kind of logic.

Interesting, how do you read /$var/?

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

G'day Smonff,

I suggest you bookmark these perlre sections:

• Metacharacters
• Assertions
• Modifiers

Perhaps you can write your own cheat sheet based on the information there.

For me it's (first) power (^) and (then) money ($). Although the reverse is also possible, depending your state corruption flavour. For those reminiscent of the glorious past it could be the power of the dollar.

bw, bliako

Unfortunately for me the phrase regarding which comes first between money and power is always the Scarface quote, so the money would come first.

Luckikly not a day goes by that I don't work with some regex or another so these symbols are just ingrained by now.

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I'd be thinking of the Simpsons version and wondering what sugar matched . . .

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

Yeah, I'm just used to using it in *nix systems generally, eg vi/vim's matching for search-&-replace .

Hence it's now ingrained in my head/fingers :)

I thought of something like this:

I begin reading at the top of a page, so I see ^ pointing to the beginning of the text on a page, or here to the beginning of the string.

Currently I don't have a similar picture for the $ at the end. But this decision is a 50/50 chance, so if I can memorize the ^ for the beginning, the other must be for the end.

I think of '^' as indicating "the top", and '$' as the "bottom line".

Found this nice one from Antony Panozzo’s blog:

Regular expressions are perfect, like the Garden of Eden.

Snakes end the Garden of Eden.
[download]

To complete your Eden analogy:

 ^
/👁\

The caret reminds me of a floating triangle.

The Eye of Providence is a symbol for God, "the beginning of all".

edit

Depicted on millions of $-bills ... ;)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the 𐍀𐌴𐍂𐌻 Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

It looks like a very Perlish interpretation indeed, possibly one of the most appropriate. I’ll keep digging into this. It also nicely links to the masonry mnemonic that @Discipulus gave, the roof caret and pay bill in the end.

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For the record, the same question was asked on Stack Overflow ten years ago.

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