Expression (Extended Mix)

Note: You cannot mix xdofx statements with XSL expressions in the same context. For example, assume you had two elements, FIRST_NAME and LAST_NAME that you wanted to concatenate into a 30-character field and right pad the field with the character "x", you could NOT use the following:

Expression (Extended Mix)

Except for "The Basics" section, this page assumes you are familiar with regular expression basics, like what is a "pattern", what does it look like, and how it is basically used. For a reference on how they are used, plus various examples of the same, see discussions of m//, s///, qr// and "??" in "Regexp Quote-Like Operators" in perlop.

Regular expressions are strings with the very particular syntax and meaning described in this document and auxiliary documents referred to by this one. The strings are called "patterns". Patterns are used to determine if some other string, called the "target", has (or doesn't have) the characteristics specified by the pattern. We call this "matching" the target string against the pattern. Usually the match is done by having the target be the first operand, and the pattern be the second operand, of one of the two binary operators = and !, listed in "Binding Operators" in perlop; and the pattern will have been converted from an ordinary string by one of the operators in "Regexp Quote-Like Operators" in perlop, like so:

Alternatives are tried from left to right, so the first alternative found for which the entire expression matches, is the one that is chosen. This means that alternatives are not necessarily greedy. For example: when matching foofoot against "barefoot", only the "foo" part will match, as that is the first alternative tried, and it successfully matches the target string. (This might not seem important, but it is important when you are capturing matched text using parentheses.)

These rules were designed for compactness of expression, rather than legibility and maintainability. The "/x and /xx" pattern modifiers allow you to insert white space to improve readability. And use of re 'strict' adds extra checking to catch some typos that might silently compile into something unintended.

There are a number of flags that can be found at the end of regular expression constructs that are not generic regular expression flags, but apply to the operation being performed, like matching or substitution (m// or s/// respectively).

Regular expression modifiers are usually written in documentation as e.g., "the /x modifier", even though the delimiter in question might not really be a slash. The modifiers /imnsxadlup may also be embedded within the regular expression itself using the (?...) construct, see "Extended Patterns" below.

A single /x tells the regular expression parser to ignore most whitespace that is neither backslashed nor within a bracketed character class. You can use this to break up your regular expression into more readable parts. Also, the "#" character is treated as a metacharacter introducing a comment that runs up to the pattern's closing delimiter, or to the end of the current line if the pattern extends onto the next line. Hence, this is very much like an ordinary Perl code comment. (You can include the closing delimiter within the comment only if you precede it with a backslash, so be careful!)

The /d, /u, and /l modifiers are not likely to be of much use to you, and so you need not worry about them very much. They exist for Perl's internal use, so that complex regular expression data structures can be automatically serialized and later exactly reconstituted, including all their nuances. But, since Perl can't keep a secret, and there may be rare instances where they are useful, they are documented here.

At any given time, exactly one of these modifiers is in effect. Their existence allows Perl to keep the originally compiled behavior of a regular expression, regardless of what rules are in effect when it is actually executed. And if it is interpolated into a larger regex, the original's rules continue to apply to it, and don't affect the other parts.

The /l and /u modifiers are automatically selected for regular expressions compiled within the scope of various pragmas, and we recommend that in general, you use those pragmas instead of specifying these modifiers explicitly. For one thing, the modifiers affect only pattern matching, and do not extend to even any replacement done, whereas using the pragmas gives consistent results for all appropriate operations within their scopes. For example,

will match "foo" using the locale's rules for case-insensitive matching, but the /l does not affect how the \U operates. Most likely you want both of them to use locale rules. To do this, instead compile the regular expression within the scope of use locale. This both implicitly adds the /l, and applies locale rules to the \U. The lesson is to use locale, and not /l explicitly.

This modifier may be specified to be the default by use re '/a' or use re '/aa'. If you do so, you may actually have occasion to use the /u modifier explicitly if there are a few regular expressions where you do want full Unicode rules (but even here, it's best if everything were under feature "unicode_strings", along with the use re '/aa'). Also see "Which character set modifier is in effect?".

Which of these modifiers is in effect at any given point in a regular expression depends on a fairly complex set of interactions. These have been designed so that in general you don't have to worry about it, but this section gives the gory details. As explained below in "Extended Patterns" it is possible to explicitly specify modifiers that apply only to portions of a regular expression. The innermost always has priority over any outer ones, and one applying to the whole expression has priority over any of the default settings that are described in the remainder of this section.

The use re '/foo' pragma can be used to set default modifiers (including these) for regular expressions compiled within its scope. This pragma has precedence over the other pragmas listed below that also change the defaults.

Otherwise, use locale sets the default modifier to /l; and use feature 'unicode_strings, or use v5.12 (or higher) set the default to /u when not in the same scope as either use locale or use bytes. (use locale ':not_characters' also sets the default to /u, overriding any plain use locale.) Unlike the mechanisms mentioned above, these affect operations besides regular expressions pattern matching, and so give more consistent results with other operators, including using \U, \l, etc. in substitution replacements.

as we know that if the final quote does not match, backtracking will not help. See the independent subexpression "(?>pattern)" for more details; possessive quantifiers are just syntactic sugar for that construct. For instance the above example could also be written as follows:

You can dispense with numbers altogether and create named capture groups. The notation is (?...) to declare and \gname to reference. (To be compatible with .Net regular expressions, \gname may also be written as \kname, \k or \k'name'.) name must not begin with a number, nor contain hyphens. When different groups within the same pattern have the same name, any reference to that name assumes the leftmost defined group. Named groups count in absolute and relative numbering, and so can also be referred to by those numbers. (It's possible to do things with named capture groups that would otherwise require (??).)

Perl uses the same mechanism to produce $1, $2, etc, so you also pay a price for each pattern that contains capturing parentheses. (To avoid this cost while retaining the grouping behaviour, use the extended regular expression (?: ... ) instead.) But if you never use $&, $` or $', then patterns without capturing parentheses will not be penalized. So avoid $&, $', and $` if you can, but if you can't (and some algorithms really appreciate them), once you've used them once, use them at will, because you've already paid the price.

Backslashed metacharacters in Perl are alphanumeric, such as \b, \w, \n. Unlike some other regular expression languages, there are no backslashed symbols that aren't alphanumeric. So anything that looks like \\, \(, \), \[, \], \, or \ is always interpreted as a literal character, not a metacharacter. This was once used in a common idiom to disable or quote the special meanings of regular expression metacharacters in a string that you want to use for a pattern. Simply quote all non-"word" characters:

A question mark was chosen for this and for the minimal-matching construct because 1) question marks are rare in older regular expressions, and 2) whenever you see one, you should stop and "question" exactly what is going on. That's psychology....

A named capture group. Identical in every respect to normal capturing parentheses () but for the additional fact that the group can be referred to by name in various regular expression constructs (like \gNAME) and can be accessed by name after a successful match via %+ or %-. See perlvar for more details on the %+ and %- hashes.

In literal patterns, the code is parsed at the same time as the surrounding code. While within the pattern, control is passed temporarily back to the perl parser, until the logically-balancing closing brace is encountered. This is similar to the way that an array index expression in a literal string is handled, for example

switch. If not used in this way, the result of evaluation of code is put into the special variable $^R. This happens immediately, so $^R can be used from other (? code ) assertions inside the same regular expression.

This is a "postponed" regular subexpression. It behaves in exactly the same way as a (? code ) code block as described above, except that its return value, rather than being assigned to $^R, is treated as a pattern, compiled if it's a string (or used as-is if its a qr// object), then matched as if it were inserted instead of this construct. 041b061a72