regex for a phrase beginning with some chars

smanicka has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: regex for a phrase beginning with some chars by kennethk (Abbot) on Feb 18, 2009 at 20:36 UTC
A good general resource for crafting regexes is perlretut and is worth a read through. For your case as described, you could use `/^ascii/i`. This expression does the following: Starts at the beginning of a phrase ( /^ ) Matches the letters 'ascii' in order ( ascii ) Runs the matching in a case insensitive fashion ( /i )	[reply] [d/l]
Re: regex for a phrase beginning with some chars by tirwhan (Abbot) on Feb 18, 2009 at 20:37 UTC
perldoc perlre, the metacharacter "^" is your friend (or if you're PBP-inclined use "\A"). Then progress backwards to the "i" modifier and you're done. All dogma is stupid.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: regex for a phrase beginning with some chars by toolic (Bishop) on Feb 18, 2009 at 20:41 UTC
The `\b` anchor may also be useful, depending on how you define a "word": `use strict; use warnings; while (<DATA>) { print if /^ascii\b/i; } __DATA__ does not begin with ascii ascii is the one AsCii works too asciibetically sorted` [download] Prints: `ascii is the one AsCii works too` [download] Updated: Added "asciibetically" line to demonstrate `\b` (johngg++)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: regex for a phrase beginning with some chars by johngg (Canon) on Feb 18, 2009 at 22:12 UTC
I think your application of the `\b` anchor might better have been demonstrated with a string like "asciibetically sorted" which would show that there is no word boundary after the "ascii" part. Cheers, JohnGG	[reply] [d/l]