>> I didn't understand s and m switch of regex until furry_marmot's explanation...

Thanks. Actually, they confused me for a long time when I was first learning Perl. I finally got it when I read Jeffrey Friedl's Mastering Regular Expressions; but I've always found a good example goes a loooong way.

Some things to remember:

1. .+ and .* are greedy. They look as far forward as they can and then work backwards to find the largest match possible (see example below).
2. .+? and .*? are not greedy. They search forward from the current string position to find the earliest match possible. These are slower (I forget by how much), but sometimes they are what you need.
3. /s allows '.' to match newlines, so .+ will look all the way to the end of whatever you're searching, whether it's a few characters, or several Kb of text, and then starts working backwards. Without /s, it only looks to the next newline to start looking back.
4. /m is shorthand for (though not quite identical to) anchoring on a newline, but it can be useful to think of embedded lines in a block of text instead of thinking of a bunch of text and newlines all jumbled together.

>> Do you have any example case like 'little prince' example for /ms?

Sure. Here's an email header I pulled out of my spam catcher, with a bunch of regexes to illustrate.

$text = <<'EOT';
Message-ID: <ODM2bWFpbGVyLmRpZWJlYS40MjYyNjE2LjEyOTU1NDE2MTg=@out-p-h.
+customernews.net>
From: "GenericOnline Pharmacy" <marmot@furrytorium.com>
To: "Angie Morestead" <marmot@furrytorium.com>
Subject: Buy drugs online now!
Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:40:18 +0200
Content-Type: multipart/related; boundary="----=_Weigard_drugs_CG_0"
EOT

$text =~ /^Subject:.+drugs/m; # Anchor just after \n, before Subject. 
                              # Matches 'Subject: Buy drugs'

$text =~ /\nSubject:.+drugs/; # Equivalent

$text =~ /^Subject:.+drugs/ms;  # '.' matches newlines, all the way to
                                # '..._Weigard_drugs', which is not wh
+at we wanted.

$text =~ /^Subject:.+?drugs/ms; # '.' matches newlines, but searches f
+rom current string
                                # position, stopping when it matches '
+Subject: Buy drugs'.
                                # This is a little slower than the fir
+st two, but
                                # equivalent. /s is countered by the .
++?, but if 'drugs'
                                # was not in the Subject line, the reg
+ex would keep keep
                                # on going.

# Here are some fun ones.  

# The email address should be "Furry Marmot" <marmot@furrytorium.com>,
+ or just
# marmot@furrytorium.com. Anything else is spam. 
print "Spam!!!\n" 
    if $text =~ /^(?:From|To):\s*"(?!.+Furry Marmot)[^"]*" <marmot\@fu
+rrytorium\.com>/m;

# Regarding the [^"]*, if the regex finds Furry Marmot in quotes, it f
+ails and this isn't
# spam. But if it finds something else, we still have to match somethi
+ng between the
# quotes, and then match the email to determine if it is spam.

# I should never see anything from me, to me. 

print "Spam!!!\n" if 
    $text =~ /(?=^From:[^\n]+marmot\@furrytorium\.com).+^To:[^\n]+marm
+ot\@furrytorium\.com/ms;

# This starts at the beginning of header block, finds From: line with 
+my email address,
# resets to start of block (because of zero-width lookahead assertion)
+, then finds To:
# line with my email address. It is the equivalent of...

if ($text =~ /^From:.+marmot\@furrytorium\.com)/m && /^To:.+marmot\@fu
+rrytorium\.com/m) {
    print "Spam!!!\n" 
}

# ...but I can include the single pattern in a list of patterns that I
+ might want to match
# against the string.
[download]

>> People sometimes say regex is slow

It depends on how it's used. The regex engine is actually pretty quick, but there are certain things that can really slow it down. It's been a while since I read Friedl's book, but basically the search engine looks for the start of a pattern, and then tries to find the rest. If the rest is not there, it backs out of what it was able to match and goes looking again.

So just searching for /^From:.+marmot/m, it will first look for the beginning of the text, and then look at each character for a newline. Once it has that, it looks to see if the next character is an 'F'. If not, it backtracks and searches for the next newline. Once it finds 'From:', it looks again for a newline (because we're not using /s), and works back to see if it can find 'marmot'. If not, it backs out of the 'From:' it has matched so far and goes looking for another 'From:' line.

More complex searches can cause it to backtrack up a storm. But a well-constructed regex can minimize that. Index is probably faster at searching for plaintext, but it can't search for patterns, which limits its usefulness.

--marmot

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