Regular Expression Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition

Perl 5.8

Perl provides a rich set of regular-expression operators, constructs, and features, with more being added in each new release. Perl uses a Traditional NFA match engine. For an explanation of the rules behind an NFA engine, see "Introduction to Regexes and Pattern Matching.”

This reference covers Perl version 5.8. A number of new features will be introduced in Perl 5.10; these are covered in Table 8. Unicode features were introduced in 5.6, but did not stabilize until 5.8. Most other features work in versions 5.004 and later.