> very Perlish interpretation

well, you can try to expand this to a whole bunch of metaphors for a "Genesis of Regex" story

• . dust/sand is found everywhere
• { } Adam and Eve counting things (and being too nosy ;)
• * + stars are infinite
• ( ) clouds (or moons) covering things
• [abc] Noah's ark with each specimen once
• \b anchors
• ... and so on.

I think with some illustrations this could stick well in the head. :)

Update

For completeness, from prior posts

^ God, the beginning of all

$ the snake, the end of paradise

---

In reply to Re^4: Mnemonic for begin/end chars in regexes ("Genesis of Regex") by LanX
in thread Mnemonic for begin/end chars in regexes by Smonff

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.