Re: Irregular Expressions

Along the lines of the 'Teach a man to fish...' saying, always remember that there is excellent documentation included with perl called the 'perldocs'. The perldocs come with a great index that you can see by doing

   perldoc perl
      or
   perldoc perldoc
[download]

at a command prompt. If you are wondering if perl has a grep function, or how to use perl's grep function, you can use

   perldoc -f grep
[download]

and if perl *has* a grep function, that command will list the 'help' for it. Or, you can actually *search* the perldocs for a topic by doing 'perldoc -q <search term>'.

HTH.

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Re: Re: Irregular Expressions by JoeJaz (Monk) on Jun 17, 2003 at 18:22 UTC
I really appreciate that information. I had no idea that a tool like that was built into the perl distribution. Hopefully it will be a lot easier and more strait forward than using a web browser to search for sometimes very vague informaiton online. Thanks a bunch.	[reply]
Re: Re: Irregular Expressions by Nkuvu (Priest) on Jun 17, 2003 at 21:15 UTC
You can also use `perldoc perldoc` to read about perldoc itself. And a minor nitpick: `perldoc -q <search item>` looks for the topic in the FAQ. So it's possible to miss something that is in the perldoc using the -q switch if it's not in the FAQ. qx is one example (although admittedly it took me a bit of searching to find this example). Specifically, `perldoc -q qx` gives me the output No documentation for perl FAQ keyword 'qx' found even though `perldoc -f qx` produces Generalized quotes. See the section on "Regexp Quote-Like Operators" in the perlop manpage.	[reply] [d/l] [select]