It is my considered opinion ... that use re /flags is likley to cause more problems than it solves ...

I tend to agree, except perhaps in the context of a "shop standard" situation. (And in such circumstances, I would not feel so strongly about the issue that I would go so far as to refuse to cash my paycheck.)

Personally, I tend to go back and forth between pre- and post-Perl version 5.14 often enough that worrying about whether  '/flags' is supported just isn't worth the mental effort. This is all the more true when trying to cobble together PerlMonks regex examples.

  • . matches any single character other than \n
  • ...
Could not be simpler.

Actually, ". matches any single character" is simpler. Here we get into the related religious disputation concerning the uniform use of an  /xms tail on all regex operators. As you say, this is very much a personal preference. My own preference is to avoid "X always means Y (other than when it doesn't)" types of rules, especially in the highly counter-intuitive, already plenty confusing realm of regexes. As to the  ^ $ operators, my opinion, again (and in line with TheDamian), is that these should do one thing and one thing only (the /m thing), with the  \A \z \Z operators fulfilling more limited and common non-/m purposes. (As to the seniority of the latter operators, they have been around nearly for decades, at least since 5.8.8. My vague recollection is that they go back to very close to T0 of the Perl 5 epoch, so probably at least for decades!)

These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

... your assertion that it is indisputable is unfounded.

And was also intended for comic effect :)

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re^7: Pattern Matching by AnomalousMonk
in thread Pattern Matching by davidas

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