Hello mmkstarr, and welcome to the Monastery!

You can program in Perl without using regular expressions. On the other hand, Perl’s built-in regular expression engine is extremely powerful — in fact, it’s one of Perl’s main features — so any effort you put into learning Perl regexen will be richly repaid as you put them to use in your scripts.

The official tutorial is a good starting point: perlretut. After that, you should read through the “Pattern Matching” chapter of the Camel Book,1 although you can leave the final section, “Fancy Patterns,” till later. But, of course, the only way you’ll really learn regexen is by trial and error: write your own, experiment, and learn from your mistakes!

BTW, the language is called “Perl” (capital P, no A); the interpreter is called “perl” (no capital).

1Chapter 5 of Programming Perl (4th Edition, 2012) by Tom Christiansen, brian d foy & and Larry Wall with Jon Orwant.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

In reply to Re: Regex, the jungle survival skill by Athanasius
in thread Regex, the jungle survival skill by mmkstarr

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