Need some character class examples

[aristotle73]

I was looking over this tutorial Character Class Abbreviations on character class abbreviations and I am a little confused. I do not understand the implementation of these abbreviations. Does anyone know of any examples I could look over (I looked at the pattern matching examples but found them hard to understand as well)? Thx :D

20050102 Edit by ysth: use bracketed link instead of http://perlmonks.org...
Retitled by davido from ambiguous "Need some examples."

[sgifford]

Character classes are a way of saying this character or this other one or this other one or this other one. For example, [abc] matches a or b or c, as does the range [a-c]. The abbreviations are just shorthand for frequently used character classes. \d is shorthand for 0 or 1 or 2 or ... or 8 or 9---exactly the same as [0-9].

So, if you required that a username start with a letter then be made up of letters or numbers, you could use /[a-zA-Z]\d*/. If you wanted to match two words seperated by one or more spaces, you could use /\w+\s+\w+/.

Inverted character classes mean anything but this character or this other one or this other one. For example, [^0-9] matches anything except a digit. The abbreviation for this is \D.

So, if you want to see if a string contained any non-word characters, you could use /\W/; if you wanted to match 3 sets of digits followed by nondigits, you could use /\d+\D+\d+\D+\d+\D+/.

[phenom]

Those will come in handy with regular expressions. You should have perldoc installed on your system, so try: perldoc perlrequick and  perldoc perlretut.

print "Matched!\n" if($user =~ /^aristotle73$/i);

Try reading those first. They'll give you a better idea. HTH.

[aristotle73]

Thx, that helped a bunch :D