In a regular expression, the "\xNN" escape always takes exactly two hexadecimal digits, so can only match characters in the range "\x00" to "\xFF". Adding braces like "\x{1FFFFF}" allows an arbitrary number of hexadecimal digits (presumably limited only by your architecture's integer size). perlre should explain it - search it for "long hex char".

Escapes like this also work in interpolated strings. e.g.

perl -Mutf8::all -E'say qq(\x{263a})'

[download]
perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^4: converting smart quotes by tobyink
in thread converting smart quotes by slugger415

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