perldoc -f open #### The regular expression: (?-imsx:\b[Ii]t\b(.*)[.,?]$) matches as follows: NODE EXPLANATION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (?-imsx: group, but do not capture (case-sensitive) (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not matching \n) (matching whitespace and # normally): ---------------------------------------------------------------------- \b the boundary between a word char (\w) and something that is not a word char ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Ii] any character of: 'I', 'i' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- t 't' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- \b the boundary between a word char (\w) and something that is not a word char ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ( group and capture to \1: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- .* any character except \n (0 or more times (matching the most amount possible)) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ) end of \1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [.,?] any character of: '.', ',', '?' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- $ before an optional \n, and the end of the string ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ) end of grouping ---------------------------------------------------------------------- #### #!/usr/bin/env perl use warnings; use strict; use YAPE::Regex::Explain; my $re = '\b[Ii]t\b(.*)[.,?]$'; my $parser = YAPE::Regex::Explain->new($re); print $parser->explain;