This and other RFCs are available on the web at http://dev.perl.org/rfc/ =head1 TITLE Additions to regexs =head1 VERSION Maintainer: Richard Proctor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: 27 Aug 2000 Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Version: 1 Number: 166 =head1 ABSTRACT This is a set of minor enhancements to regexs that I thought up on a long plane ride. All these can be done now, I would just like to make them easier. =head1 DESCRIPTION These are a set of minor enhancements to regexes, they are largely independant. =head2 Alternative Lists from arrays (?@foo) is sort of equivalent to (??{join('|',@foo)}), ie it expands into a list of alternatives. One could possible use just @foo, for this. If @foo contained special characters you might want to \Quote each item. (?Q@foo) is sort of equivalent to (??{join('|', map quotemeta, @foo)}) =head2 Matching Not a pattern (?^pattern) matches anything that does not match the pattern. On its own, one can use !~ etc to negatively match patterns, but to match a pattern that has foo(anything but not baz)bar is currently difficult. With this syntax it would simply be /foo(?^baz)bar/. =head2 A disambiguator (?) is a null element in a pattern, that can be used to split elements that might otherwise be confused, it has no effect otherwise, it matches nothing. If you have a variable $foo, then matching $foobar would look for the variable $foobar, when you actually meant to look for $foo then "bar". This allows the user to simply write $foo(?)bar. (Yes I know this can be written other ways but this is a simple example). =head1 IMPLENTATION No Idea =head1 REFERENCES None yet
