Describe in words that you are trying to match.

Sometimes that can help; other times it just makes things worse.

How to ask better questions using Test::More and sample data is usually the winner.

Well one would hope that "in words" means showing some examples in order to fully describe what is supposed to happen. I really have no idea from the OP's current code this thing is supposed to do. I will add "show some actual examples of match and no match" in future such requests.

Test::More is fine, but something even easier could be fine too. The OP could get his point across by flushing this out with more examples...

use strict;
use warnings;

#wild ass guess
foreach (qw( /HD123FA45
             /HD123FA45/anything
             anything/HD123FA45
             /FC/blah
             /LM
             /H4p5 
             asdf/blah/x/H4p9 
             /asdf7758
             ))
{
   print "$_ ";

   if (/\/(H|HD)[0-9]{1,3}(FA|FC|C|P|CO)[0-9]{1,3}$/i or
       /\/(FC|LM|CO)/i)
   { print "\t...match!\n"}
   else {print "\t...no match!\n";}
}
__END__

/HD123FA45     ...match!
/HD123FA45/anything     ...no match!
anything/HD123FA45     ...match!
/FC/blah     ...match!
/LM     ...match!
/H4p5     ...match!
asdf/blah/x/H4p9     ...match!
/asdf7758     ...no match!
[download]

This is bizarre to me: m/^[\w\W\s\S]+...

This means the line starts with one or more characters which are either a word character or not a word character or a space character or not a space character...

No, that means the line starts with one or more of of \, w, W, s, S. Your description would be right if the code was m/^(\w|\W|\s|\S)+...

Update: The above is wrong. See below.

[...] in a regexp is for a character class. (...) is for grouping. See perlre.

Alexander

I am not sure about that.
It is perfectly allowed to use a character class Perl short-cut within brackets, [\d] means the same as [0-9]
[\w] would mean same as [a-zA-Z0-9_]


use strict;
use warnings;

my $x = 'a34x5';

my @y = $x =~ /([\d]+)/g;
my @z = $x =~ /([0-9]+)/g;
print "@y\n";  # 34 5  \d worked fine
print "@z\n";  # 34 5

my @b = $x =~ /([\d\w]+)/g;
print "@b\n"; # a34x5  \d irrelevant but \w works

my @c = $x =~ /([\w]+)/g;  #brackets not needed
print "@c\n";  #a34x5
my @d = $x =~ /(\w+)/g;
print "@d\n";  #a34x5
[download]

No matter what, the OP's code is bizarre.

Added: The idea of using an anchor to the beginning of the string, followed by any amount of random stuff, makes no sense to me. Better to leave that off entirely (don't put /^.*(match)/, just put /(match)/.

I think if you want \ in the character set, you have to escape it with another \

I am not sure about that.

It is perfectly allowed to use a character class Perl short-cut within brackets

I get the same results, but I wonder where that is documented ...

(Some doc searching and a short meeting later ...)

It's hidden in perlrecharclass:

You can put any backslash sequence character class (with the exception of \N and \R) inside a bracketed character class, and it will act just as if you had put all characters matched by the backslash sequence inside the character class. For instance, [a-f\d] matches any decimal digit, or any of the lowercase letters between 'a' and 'f' inclusive.

[...]

Examples:

/[\p{Thai}\d]/     # Matches a character that is either a Thai
                   # character, or a digit.
/[^\p{Arabic}()]/  # Matches a character that is neither an Arabic
                   # character, nor a parenthesis.
[download]

So I stand corrected.

---

[\d] means the same as [0-9] [\w] would mean same as [a-zA-Z0-9_]

Well, that's only true if you ignore Unicode. perlre points to perlunicode, which has this nice short explaination:

\p{Word}

This is the same as \w, including over 100_000 characters beyond ASCII.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)