The Rest of the Metacharacters

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• To make . match anything at all, even \n, use the /s modifier.

        $time = <STDIN>;               # "11:29\n"
        ($minutes) = ($time =~ /:(.*)$/s);

• $minutes is now "29\n" rather than "29"

• This might be useful in HTML matching, for example:

       <p align=center><table align=center border=1><font size="+2">
       <tr><td>\d</td><td>[0-9]</td></tr>
       <tr><td>\D</td><td>[^0-9]</td></tr>
       <tr><td>\w</td><td>[A-Za-z0-9_]</td></tr>
       <tr><td>\W</td><td>[^A-Za-z0-9_]</td></tr>
       <tr><td>\s</td><td>[&nbsp;\t\n\f\r]</td></tr>
       <tr><td>\S</td><td>[^&nbsp;\t\n\f\r]</td></tr>
       </font></table></p>

• <table[^>]*?>.*</table> won't match this unless you use /s

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Copyright © 2002 M. J. Dominus