Perl's text processing power comes from its use of regular expressions. A regular expression (regex or regexp) is a pattern which describes characteristics of a piece of text. A regular expression engine interprets patterns and applies them to match or modify pieces of text.
Perl's core regex documentation includes a tutorial (perldoc perlretut), a reference guide (perldoc perlreref), and full documentation (perldoc perlre). Jeffrey Friedl's book Mastering Regular Expressions explains the theory and the mechanics of how regular expressions work. While mastering regular expressions is a daunting pursuit, a little knowledge will give you great power.
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