$w = "The wings of desire bore Adrian ever higher over the darkling
abyss of life as a scullery lad.";

if ($w =~ /abyss/) {
   print "Too romantic! \n";
}

($w =~ /bore/) && print "Put some life into it! \n";

Regular Expressions

• Standard characters like '1' and 'f' match themselves.
• Special characters match other stuff, like \t for tab, \s for white space, \d matches numeric characters, . matches anything, etc.
• 'Wildcard' characters can be used as follows:
  • /a+/ matches 1 or more a's
  • /a*/ matches 0 or more a's
  • /a?/ matches 0 or 1 a's
• [ab] matches a single 'a', or a single 'b', etc
• [^qw] matches anything except a single 'q' or a single 'w'

"This is a test" =~ /T..s/;    # matches 'This'

"This is a test" =~ /T.*s/;    # matches 'This is a tes'

"This is a test" =~ /s[^\s]/   # matches 'st'

Substitution

$x = s/reg expr/thing to substitute/

$w = "This is a mistake dyslexic";

$w =~ s/(mistake) (dyslexic)/$2 $1 \n/;

print $w;