Re^2: regex trouble

I just discovered quotemeta as a result of the recent functional functions node, so I'm pleased to see it in use here.

I have a question about your solution, though. When I print "$pattern\n", I get

\,|\||\:|\>|\]\[|_\|_
[download]

To me, it's odd that this works correctly with the comma, colon, and chevron escaped. I'll go look at perlre, but why doesn't it matter that these are escaped?

~dewey

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Re^3: regex trouble by graff (Chancellor) on May 31, 2007 at 03:32 UTC
In a regex, "\," is exactly equivalent to "," -- and likewise for colon and angle brackets. Those characters do not have any "magical" force in the regex syntax when used without escapes (in contrast to period, asterisk, square brackets and so on), nor do they have any special meaning when preceded by backslash (in contrast to "n", "t", "b", "d" and so on). Meanwhile, `quotemeta` is a more-or-less general-purpose function -- according to the manual, it 'Returns the value of EXPR with all non-"word" characters backslashed. (That is, all characters not matching "/[A-Za-z_0-9]/" will be preceded by a backslash in the returned string, regardless of any locale settings.)' (updated to fix display of square brackets in last paragraph)	[reply] [d/l]
Re^4: regex trouble by dewey (Pilgrim) on May 31, 2007 at 14:37 UTC
I see. Thanks. ~dewey	[reply]