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PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) NNNNAAAAMMMMEEEE perlfaq6 - Regexps ($Revision: 1.17 $, $Date: 1997/04/24 22:44:10 $) DDDDEEEESSSSCCCCRRRRIIIIPPPPTTTTIIIIOOOONNNN This section is surprisingly small because the rest of the FAQ is littered with answers involving regular expressions. For example, decoding a URL and checking whether something is a number are handled with regular expressions, but those answers are found elsewhere in this document (in the section on Data and the Networking one on networking, to be precise). HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII hhhhooooppppeeee ttttoooo uuuusssseeee rrrreeeegggguuuullllaaaarrrr eeeexxxxpppprrrreeeessssssssiiiioooonnnnssss wwwwiiiitttthhhhoooouuuutttt ccccrrrreeeeaaaattttiiiinnnngggg iiiilllllllleeeeggggiiiibbbblllleeee aaaannnndddd uuuunnnnmmmmaaaaiiiinnnnttttaaaaiiiinnnnaaaabbbblllleeee ccccooooddddeeee???? Three techniques can make regular expressions maintainable and understandable. Comments Outside the Regexp Describe what you're doing and how you're doing it, using normal Perl comments. # turn the line into the first word, a colon, and the # number of characters on the rest of the line s/^(\w+)(.*)/ lc($1) . ":" . length($2) /ge; Comments Inside the Regexp The /x modifier causes whitespace to be ignored in a regexp pattern (except in a character class), and also allows you to use normal comments there, too. As you can imagine, whitespace and comments help a lot. /x lets you turn this: s{<(?:[^>'"]*|".*?"|'.*?')+>}{}gs; into this: s{ < # opening angle bracket (?: # Non-backreffing grouping paren [^>'"] * # 0 or more things that are neither > nor ' nor " | # or else ".*?" # a section between double quotes (stingy match) | # or else '.*?' # a section between single quotes (stingy match) ) + # all occurring one or more times > # closing angle bracket }{}gsx; # replace with nothing, i.e. delete It's still not quite so clear as prose, but it is very useful for describing the meaning of each part of the pattern. PPPPaaaaggggeeee 1111 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) Different Delimiters While we normally think of patterns as being delimited with / characters, they can be delimited by almost any character. the _p_e_r_l_r_e manpage describes this. For example, the s/// above uses braces as delimiters. Selecting another delimiter can avoid quoting the delimiter within the pattern: s/\/usr\/local/\/usr\/share/g; # bad delimiter choice s#/usr/local#/usr/share#g; # better IIII''''mmmm hhhhaaaavvvviiiinnnngggg ttttrrrroooouuuubbbblllleeee mmmmaaaattttcccchhhhiiiinnnngggg oooovvvveeeerrrr mmmmoooorrrreeee tttthhhhaaaannnn oooonnnneeee lllliiiinnnneeee.... WWWWhhhhaaaatttt''''ssss wwwwrrrroooonnnngggg???? Either you don't have newlines in your string, or you aren't using the correct _m_o_d_i_f_i_e_r(s) on your pattern. There are many ways to get multiline data into a string. If you want it to happen automatically while reading input, you'll want to set $/ (probably to '' for paragraphs or undef for the whole file) to allow you to read more than one line at a time. Read the _p_e_r_l_r_e manpage to help you decide which of /s and /m (or both) you might want to use: /s allows dot to include newline, and /m allows caret and dollar to match next to a newline, not just at the end of the string. You do need to make sure that you've actually got a multiline string in there. For example, this program detects duplicate words, even when they span line breaks (but not paragraph ones). For this example, we don't need /s because we aren't using dot in a regular expression that we want to cross line boundaries. Neither do we need /m because we aren't wanting caret or dollar to match at any point inside the record next to newlines. But it's imperative that $/ be set to something other than the default, or else we won't actually ever have a multiline record read in. $/ = ''; # read in more whole paragraph, not just one line while ( <> ) { while ( /\b(\w\S+)(\s+\1)+\b/gi ) { print "Duplicate $1 at paragraph $.\n"; } } Here's code that finds sentences that begin with "From " (which would be mangled by many mailers): $/ = ''; # read in more whole paragraph, not just one line while ( <> ) { while ( /^From /gm ) { # /m makes ^ match next to \n print "leading from in paragraph $.\n"; } } PPPPaaaaggggeeee 2222 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) Here's code that finds everything between START and END in a paragraph: undef $/; # read in whole file, not just one line or paragraph while ( <> ) { while ( /START(.*?)END/sm ) { # /s makes . cross line boundaries print "$1\n"; } } HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII ppppuuuullllllll oooouuuutttt lllliiiinnnneeeessss bbbbeeeettttwwwweeeeeeeennnn ttttwwwwoooo ppppaaaatttttttteeeerrrrnnnnssss tttthhhhaaaatttt aaaarrrreeee tttthhhheeeemmmmsssseeeellllvvvveeeessss oooonnnn ddddiiiiffffffffeeeerrrreeeennnntttt lllliiiinnnneeeessss???? You can use Perl's somewhat exotic .. operator (documented in the _p_e_r_l_o_p manpage): perl -ne 'print if /START/ .. /END/' file1 file2 ... If you wanted text and not lines, you would use perl -0777 -pe 'print "$1\n" while /START(.*?)END/gs' file1 file2 ... But if you want nested occurrences of START through END, you'll run up against the problem described in the question in this section on matching balanced text. IIII ppppuuuutttt aaaa rrrreeeegggguuuullllaaaarrrr eeeexxxxpppprrrreeeessssssssiiiioooonnnn iiiinnnnttttoooo $$$$//// bbbbuuuutttt iiiitttt ddddiiiiddddnnnn''''tttt wwwwoooorrrrkkkk.... WWWWhhhhaaaatttt''''ssss wwwwrrrroooonnnngggg???? $/ must be a string, not a regular expression. Awk has to be better for something. :-) Actually, you could do this if you don't mind reading the whole file into memory: undef $/; @records = split /your_pattern/, <FH>; The Net::Telnet module (available from CPAN) has the capability to wait for a pattern in the input stream, or timeout if it doesn't appear within a certain time. ## Create a file with three lines. open FH, ">file"; print FH "The first line\nThe second line\nThe third line\n"; close FH; ## Get a read/write filehandle to it. $fh = new FileHandle "+<file"; ## Attach it to a "stream" object. use Net::Telnet; $file = new Net::Telnet (-fhopen => $fh); PPPPaaaaggggeeee 3333 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) ## Search for the second line and print out the third. $file->waitfor('/second line\n/'); print $file->getline; HHHHoooowwww ddddoooo IIII ssssuuuubbbbssssttttiiiittttuuuutttteeee ccccaaaasssseeee iiiinnnnsssseeeennnnssssiiiittttiiiivvvveeeellllyyyy oooonnnn tttthhhheeee LLLLHHHHSSSS,,,, bbbbuuuutttt pppprrrreeeesssseeeerrrrvvvviiiinnnngggg ccccaaaasssseeee oooonnnn tttthhhheeee RRRRHHHHSSSS???? It depends on what you mean by "preserving case". The following script makes the substitution have the same case, letter by letter, as the original. If the substitution has more characters than the string being substituted, the case of the last character is used for the rest of the substitution. # Original by Nathan Torkington, massaged by Jeffrey Friedl # sub preserve_case($$) { my ($old, $new) = @_; my ($state) = 0; # 0 = no change; 1 = lc; 2 = uc my ($i, $oldlen, $newlen, $c) = (0, length($old), length($new)); my ($len) = $oldlen < $newlen ? $oldlen : $newlen; for ($i = 0; $i < $len; $i++) { if ($c = substr($old, $i, 1), $c =~ /[\W\d_]/) { $state = 0; } elsif (lc $c eq $c) { substr($new, $i, 1) = lc(substr($new, $i, 1)); $state = 1; } else { substr($new, $i, 1) = uc(substr($new, $i, 1)); $state = 2; } } # finish up with any remaining new (for when new is longer than old) if ($newlen > $oldlen) { if ($state == 1) { substr($new, $oldlen) = lc(substr($new, $oldlen)); } elsif ($state == 2) { substr($new, $oldlen) = uc(substr($new, $oldlen)); } } return $new; } $a = "this is a TEsT case"; $a =~ s/(test)/preserve_case($1, "success")/gie; print "$a\n"; This prints: PPPPaaaaggggeeee 4444 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) this is a SUcCESS case HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII mmmmaaaakkkkeeee \\\\wwww match accented characters? See the _p_e_r_l_l_o_c_a_l_e manpage. HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII mmmmaaaattttcccchhhh aaaa llllooooccccaaaalllleeee----ssssmmmmaaaarrrrtttt vvvveeeerrrrssssiiiioooonnnn ooooffff ////[[[[aaaa----zzzzAAAA----ZZZZ]]]]////? One alphabetic character would be /[^\W\d_]/, no matter what locale you're in. Non-alphabetics would be /[\W\d_]/ (assuming you don't consider an underscore a letter). HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII qqqquuuuooootttteeee aaaa vvvvaaaarrrriiiiaaaabbbblllleeee ttttoooo uuuusssseeee iiiinnnn aaaa rrrreeeeggggeeeexxxxpppp???? The Perl parser will expand $variable and @variable references in regular expressions unless the delimiter is a single quote. Remember, too, that the right-hand side of a s/// substitution is considered a double-quoted string (see the _p_e_r_l_o_p manpage for more details). Remember also that any regexp special characters will be acted on unless you precede the substitution with \Q. Here's an example: $string = "to die?"; $lhs = "die?"; $rhs = "sleep no more"; $string =~ s/\Q$lhs/$rhs/; # $string is now "to sleep no more" Without the \Q, the regexp would also spuriously match "di". WWWWhhhhaaaatttt iiiissss ////oooo really for? Using a variable in a regular expression match forces a re-evaluation (and perhaps recompilation) each time through. The /o modifier locks in the regexp the first time it's used. This always happens in a constant regular expression, and in fact, the pattern was compiled into the internal format at the same time your entire program was. Use of /o is irrelevant unless variable interpolation is used in the pattern, and if so, the regexp engine will neither know nor care whether the variables change after the pattern is evaluated the _v_e_r_y _f_i_r_s_t time. /o is often used to gain an extra measure of efficiency by not performing subsequent evaluations when you know it won't matter (because you know the variables won't change), or more rarely, when you don't want the regexp to notice if they do. For example, here's a "paragrep" program: PPPPaaaaggggeeee 5555 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) $/ = ''; # paragraph mode $pat = shift; while (<>) { print if /$pat/o; } HHHHoooowwww ddddoooo IIII uuuusssseeee aaaa rrrreeeegggguuuullllaaaarrrr eeeexxxxpppprrrreeeessssssssiiiioooonnnn ttttoooo ssssttttrrrriiiipppp CCCC ssssttttyyyylllleeee ccccoooommmmmmmmeeeennnnttttssss ffffrrrroooommmm aaaa ffffiiiilllleeee???? While this actually can be done, it's much harder than you'd think. For example, this one-liner perl -0777 -pe 's{/\*.*?\*/}{}gs' foo.c will work in many but not all cases. You see, it's too simple-minded for certain kinds of C programs, in particular, those with what appear to be comments in quoted strings. For that, you'd need something like this, created by Jeffrey Friedl: $/ = undef; $_ = <>; s#/\*[^*]*\*+([^/*][^*]*\*+)*/|("(\\.|[^"\\])*"|'(\\.|[^'\\])*'|\n+|.[^/"'\\]*)#$2#g; print; This could, of course, be more legibly written with the /x modifier, adding whitespace and comments. CCCCaaaannnn IIII uuuusssseeee PPPPeeeerrrrllll rrrreeeegggguuuullllaaaarrrr eeeexxxxpppprrrreeeessssssssiiiioooonnnnssss ttttoooo mmmmaaaattttcccchhhh bbbbaaaallllaaaannnncccceeeedddd tttteeeexxxxtttt???? Although Perl regular expressions are more powerful than "mathematical" regular expressions, because they feature conveniences like backreferences (\1 and its ilk), they still aren't powerful enough. You still need to use non-regexp techniques to parse balanced text, such as the text enclosed between matching parentheses or braces, for example. An elaborate subroutine (for 7-bit ASCII only) to pull out balanced and possibly nested single chars, like ` and ', { and }, or ( and ) can be found in http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/id/TOMC/scripts/pull_quotes.gz . The C::Scan module from CPAN contains such subs for internal usage, but they are undocumented. WWWWhhhhaaaatttt ddddooooeeeessss iiiitttt mmmmeeeeaaaannnn tttthhhhaaaatttt rrrreeeeggggeeeexxxxppppssss aaaarrrreeee ggggrrrreeeeeeeeddddyyyy???? HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII ggggeeeetttt aaaarrrroooouuuunnnndddd iiiitttt???? Most people mean that greedy regexps match as much as they can. Technically speaking, it's actually the quantifiers (?, *, +, {}) that are greedy rather than the whole pattern; Perl prefers local greed and immediate gratification to overall greed. To get non-greedy versions of the same quantifiers, use (??, *?, +?, {}?). PPPPaaaaggggeeee 6666 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) An example: $s1 = $s2 = "I am very very cold"; $s1 =~ s/ve.*y //; # I am cold $s2 =~ s/ve.*?y //; # I am very cold Notice how the second substitution stopped matching as soon as it encountered "y ". The *? quantifier effectively tells the regular expression engine to find a match as quickly as possible and pass control on to whatever is next in line, like you would if you were playing hot potato. HHHHoooowwww ddddoooo IIII pppprrrroooocccceeeessssssss eeeeaaaacccchhhh wwwwoooorrrrdddd oooonnnn eeeeaaaacccchhhh lllliiiinnnneeee???? Use the split function: while (<>) { foreach $word ( split ) { # do something with $word here } } Note that this isn't really a word in the English sense; it's just chunks of consecutive non-whitespace characters. To work with only alphanumeric sequences, you might consider while (<>) { foreach $word (m/(\w+)/g) { # do something with $word here } } HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII pppprrrriiiinnnntttt oooouuuutttt aaaa wwwwoooorrrrdddd----ffffrrrreeeeqqqquuuueeeennnnccccyyyy oooorrrr lllliiiinnnneeee----ffffrrrreeeeqqqquuuueeeennnnccccyyyy ssssuuuummmmmmmmaaaarrrryyyy???? To do this, you have to parse out each word in the input stream. We'll pretend that by word you mean chunk of alphabetics, hyphens, or apostrophes, rather than the non-whitespace chunk idea of a word given in the previous question: while (<>) { while ( /(\b[^\W_\d][\w'-]+\b)/g ) { # misses "`sheep'" $seen{$1}++; } } while ( ($word, $count) = each %seen ) { print "$count $word\n"; } If you wanted to do the same thing for lines, you wouldn't need a regular expression: PPPPaaaaggggeeee 7777 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) while (<>) { $seen{$_}++; } while ( ($line, $count) = each %seen ) { print "$count $line"; } If you want these output in a sorted order, see the section on Hashes. HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII ddddoooo aaaapppppppprrrrooooxxxxiiiimmmmaaaatttteeee mmmmaaaattttcccchhhhiiiinnnngggg???? See the module String::Approx available from CPAN. HHHHoooowwww ddddoooo IIII eeeeffffffffiiiicccciiiieeeennnnttttllllyyyy mmmmaaaattttcccchhhh mmmmaaaannnnyyyy rrrreeeegggguuuullllaaaarrrr eeeexxxxpppprrrreeeessssssssiiiioooonnnnssss aaaatttt oooonnnncccceeee???? The following is super-inefficient: while (<FH>) { foreach $pat (@patterns) { if ( /$pat/ ) { # do something } } } Instead, you either need to use one of the experimental Regexp extension modules from CPAN (which might well be overkill for your purposes), or else put together something like this, inspired from a routine in Jeffrey Friedl's book: sub _bm_build { my $condition = shift; my @regexp = @_; # this MUST not be local(); need my() my $expr = join $condition => map { "m/\$regexp[$_]/o" } (0..$#regexp); my $match_func = eval "sub { $expr }"; die if $@; # propagate $@; this shouldn't happen! return $match_func; } sub bm_and { _bm_build('&&', @_) } sub bm_or { _bm_build('||', @_) } $f1 = bm_and qw{ xterm (?i)window }; $f2 = bm_or qw{ \b[Ff]ree\b \bBSD\B (?i)sys(tem)?\s*[V5]\b }; PPPPaaaaggggeeee 8888 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) # feed me /etc/termcap, prolly while ( <> ) { print "1: $_" if &$f1; print "2: $_" if &$f2; } WWWWhhhhyyyy ddddoooonnnn''''tttt wwwwoooorrrrdddd----bbbboooouuuunnnnddddaaaarrrryyyy sssseeeeaaaarrrrcccchhhheeeessss wwwwiiiitttthhhh \\\\bbbb work for me? Two common misconceptions are that \b is a synonym for \s+, and that it's the edge between whitespace characters and non-whitespace characters. Neither is correct. \b is the place between a \w character and a \W character (that is, \b is the edge of a "word"). It's a zero-width assertion, just like ^, $, and all the other anchors, so it doesn't consume any characters. the _p_e_r_l_r_e manpage describes the behaviour of all the regexp metacharacters. Here are examples of the incorrect application of \b, with fixes: "two words" =~ /(\w+)\b(\w+)/; # WRONG "two words" =~ /(\w+)\s+(\w+)/; # right " =matchless= text" =~ /\b=(\w+)=\b/; # WRONG " =matchless= text" =~ /=(\w+)=/; # right Although they may not do what you thought they did, \b and \B can still be quite useful. For an example of the correct use of \b, see the example of matching duplicate words over multiple lines. An example of using \B is the pattern \Bis\B. This will find occurrences of "is" on the insides of words only, as in "thistle", but not "this" or "island". WWWWhhhhyyyy ddddooooeeeessss uuuussssiiiinnnngggg $$$$&&&&,,,, $$$$````,,,, oooorrrr $$$$'''' sssslllloooowwww mmmmyyyy pppprrrrooooggggrrrraaaammmm ddddoooowwwwnnnn???? Because once Perl sees that you need one of these variables anywhere in the program, it has to provide them on each and every pattern match. The same mechanism that handles these provides for the use of $1, $2, etc., so you pay the same price for each regexp that contains capturing parentheses. But if you never use $&, etc., in your script, then regexps _w_i_t_h_o_u_t capturing parentheses won't 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. WWWWhhhhaaaatttt ggggoooooooodddd iiiissss \\\\GGGG in a regular expression? The notation \G is used in a match or substitution in conjunction the /g modifier (and ignored if there's no /g) to anchor the regular expression to the point just past where the last match occurred, i.e. the _p_o_s() point. PPPPaaaaggggeeee 9999 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) For example, suppose you had a line of text quoted in standard mail and Usenet notation, (that is, with leading > characters), and you want change each leading > into a corresponding :. You could do so in this way: s/^(>+)/':' x length($1)/gem; Or, using \G, the much simpler (and faster): s/\G>/:/g; A more sophisticated use might involve a tokenizer. The following lex- like example is courtesy of Jeffrey Friedl. It did not work in 5.003 due to bugs in that release, but does work in 5.004 or better. (Note the use of /c, which prevents a failed match with /g from resetting the search position back to the beginning of the string.) while (<>) { chomp; PARSER: { m/ \G( \d+\b )/gcx && do { print "number: $1\n"; redo; }; m/ \G( \w+ )/gcx && do { print "word: $1\n"; redo; }; m/ \G( \s+ )/gcx && do { print "space: $1\n"; redo; }; m/ \G( [^\w\d]+ )/gcx && do { print "other: $1\n"; redo; }; } } Of course, that could have been written as while (<>) { chomp; PARSER: { if ( /\G( \d+\b )/gcx { print "number: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } if ( /\G( \w+ )/gcx { print "word: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } if ( /\G( \s+ )/gcx { print "space: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } if ( /\G( [^\w\d]+ )/gcx { print "other: $1\n"; redo PARSER; } } } But then you lose the vertical alignment of the regular expressions. PPPPaaaaggggeeee 11110000 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) AAAArrrreeee PPPPeeeerrrrllll rrrreeeeggggeeeexxxxppppssss DDDDFFFFAAAAssss oooorrrr NNNNFFFFAAAAssss???? AAAArrrreeee tttthhhheeeeyyyy PPPPOOOOSSSSIIIIXXXX ccccoooommmmpppplllliiiiaaaannnntttt???? While it's true that Perl's regular expressions resemble the DFAs (deterministic finite automata) of the _e_g_r_e_p(1) program, they are in fact implemented as NFAs (non-deterministic finite automata) to allow backtracking and backreferencing. And they aren't POSIX-style either, because those guarantee worst-case behavior for all cases. (It seems that some people prefer guarantees of consistency, even when what's guaranteed is slowness.) See the book "Mastering Regular Expressions" (from O'Reilly) by Jeffrey Friedl for all the details you could ever hope to know on these matters (a full citation appears in the _p_e_r_l_f_a_q_2 manpage). WWWWhhhhaaaatttt''''ssss wwwwrrrroooonnnngggg wwwwiiiitttthhhh uuuussssiiiinnnngggg ggggrrrreeeepppp oooorrrr mmmmaaaapppp iiiinnnn aaaa vvvvooooiiiidddd ccccoooonnnntttteeeexxxxtttt???? Strictly speaking, nothing. Stylistically speaking, it's not a good way to write maintainable code. That's because you're using these constructs not for their return values but rather for their side-effects, and side- effects can be mystifying. There's no void _g_r_e_p() that's not better written as a for (well, foreach, technically) loop. HHHHoooowwww ccccaaaannnn IIII mmmmaaaattttcccchhhh ssssttttrrrriiiinnnnggggssss wwwwiiiitttthhhh mmmmuuuullllttttiiiibbbbyyyytttteeee cccchhhhaaaarrrraaaacccctttteeeerrrrssss???? This is hard, and there's no good way. Perl does not directly support wide characters. It pretends that a byte and a character are synonymous. The following set of approaches was offered by Jeffrey Friedl, whose article in issue #5 of The Perl Journal talks about this very matter. Let's suppose you have some weird Martian encoding where pairs of ASCII uppercase letters encode single Martian letters (i.e. the two bytes "CV" make a single Martian letter, as do the two bytes "SG", "VS", "XX", etc.). Other bytes represent single characters, just like ASCII. So, the string of Martian "I am CVSGXX!" uses 12 bytes to encode the nine characters 'I', ' ', 'a', 'm', ' ', 'CV', 'SG', 'XX', '!'. Now, say you want to search for the single character /GX/. Perl doesn't know about Martian, so it'll find the two bytes "GX" in the "I am CVSGXX!" string, even though that character isn't there: it just looks like it is because "SG" is next to "XX", but there's no real "GX". This is a big problem. Here are a few ways, all painful, to deal with it: $martian =~ s/([A-Z][A-Z])/ $1 /g; # Make sure adjacent ``martian'' bytes # are no longer adjacent. print "found GX!\n" if $martian =~ /GX/; Or like this: PPPPaaaaggggeeee 11111111 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) @chars = $martian =~ m/([A-Z][A-Z]|[^A-Z])/g; # above is conceptually similar to: @chars = $text =~ m/(.)/g; # foreach $char (@chars) { print "found GX!\n", last if $char eq 'GX'; } Or like this: while ($martian =~ m/\G([A-Z][A-Z]|.)/gs) { # \G probably unneeded print "found GX!\n", last if $1 eq 'GX'; } Or like this: die "sorry, Perl doesn't (yet) have Martian support )-:\n"; In addition, a sample program which converts half-width to full-width katakana (in Shift-JIS or EUC encoding) is available from CPAN as There are many double- (and multi-) byte encodings commonly used these days. Some versions of these have 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-byte characters, all mixed. AAAAUUUUTTTTHHHHOOOORRRR AAAANNNNDDDD CCCCOOOOPPPPYYYYRRRRIIIIGGGGHHHHTTTT Copyright (c) 1997 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington. All rights reserved. See the _p_e_r_l_f_a_q manpage for distribution information. PPPPaaaaggggeeee 11112222 PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPEEEERRRRLLLLFFFFAAAAQQQQ6666((((1111)))) PPPPaaaaggggeeee 11113333 
