For that kind of student, I like to introduce them in three stages, leaving out fancy stuff like extended constructs.

  1. literal matches, easy for everyone
  2. builtin character classes and escaped characters, give them a little power
  3. user character classes and anchors, separate the sheep from the goats

The omission of alternation is intentional. Unsophisticated users overuse them and can easily land themselves in a computational tarpit.

The postgraduate course is to point out some of the other things possible and refer to perlretut and perlre.

The key is to show them new things that are useful to them right away. Don't demand big conceptual leaps without motivation, and allow them to practice before demanding another.

An editor which does incremental regex searches with highlighting is valuable for illustrating how regexen work, live. Emacs incremental search is documented in info emacs Incremental Search. Vim documents its version in the "pattern.txt" manual chapter.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: Training non-programmers in Perl regexps by Zaxo
in thread Training non-programmers in Perl regexps by young_stu

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