Other Escape Sequences and Assertions
Explore how to use escape sequences in Perl regular expressions to match literal metacharacters safely. Understand zero-width assertions like look-ahead and look-behind to create precise pattern matches without consuming characters, enhancing your regex skills for powerful text processing.
Other escape sequences
To match a literal instance of a metacharacter, escape it with a backslash \. We’ve seen this before, where \( refers to a single left parenthesis and \] refers
to a single right square bracket. \. refers to a literal period character instead
of the “match anything but an explicit newline character” atom.
Remember to escape the alternation metacharacter |, as well as the end-of-line metacharacter $ and the quantifiers +, ?, and * if you want to match their symbols literally.
The metacharacter disabling characters (\Q and \E) disable metacharacter
interpretation within their boundaries. This is especially useful when we
don’t control the source of ...