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Matching strings with non-word characters

by chas (Priest)
on Apr 17, 2006 at 13:14 UTC ( [id://543808]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

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

I'm trying to match strings such as "X \ n a x" which appear in spam email so I can filter. I can do this but not in a completely satisfactory way. I guess I've just gotten myself confused, but I don't understand why
$_="X "; if(m'X\ '){print "OK1\n";} $_='X\ '; if(m'X\ '){print "OK2\n";}
produces "OK1" only. I would expect the first match to fail and the second to succeed. Thanks for any comments!

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Re: Matching strings with non-word characters
by Tanktalus (Canon) on Apr 17, 2006 at 13:19 UTC

    That's because \ is a special character. Thus, you need to escape it if you want it to appear literally. To escape it, just use a backslash - thus, you get m'X\\ '. Although I think the single-quote as a seperator is a bit wierd.

      Thanks! I used single quote as separator because I thought that would make the "\" not considered special. I guess that is wrong. (Using single quote prevents interpolation in patterns, though.)

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