in reply to Re^5: Regex Tool
in thread Regex Tool

Previous \<, \>, \b indicates boundry. \< is beginning of word, \> is end of word. \b indicates either boundry.
if u just put '<' in regex, it means character '<', nothing special.

e.g. /\<hell/ will only match such string/word like 'hello', 'hell' but not 'shell'

however, i seldom use word anchor. (but maybe someone else does) <\em>

I hold this statement for a while. No argument on this. I suspend these anchors ( \< , \> ) and just use \b instead. I'll be more careful next time. Sorry everyone. This information actually referred to unreliable / wrong sources. Thanks for all feedbacks.

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Re^7: Regex Tool
by Corion (Patriarch) on Jul 04, 2006 at 09:11 UTC

    Did you test your claim at all?

    use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my $matched = /\<hell/ ? 'yes' : 'no';
    print "/\\<hell/ matches '$_'? $matched\n"
}

__DATA__
shell
hell
this is hell
this is hellish
this is <hell
this is <hellish
some shells are bad

    [download]

    When run, this prints

    Q:\>perl -w tmp.pl
'shell' matches? no
'hell' matches? no
'this is hell' matches? no
'this is hellish' matches? no
'this is <hell' matches? yes
'this is <hellish' matches? yes
'some shells are bad' matches? no

    [download]

    Please read perlre before making such claims.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      I believe the '\<' syntax is grep-ish (vi too?) for word boundaries.

      a

[reply]

In Section Cool Uses for Perl