Regular Expression Pocket Reference, 2nd Edition

Supported Metacharacters

Perl supports the metacharacters and metasequences listed in Table 3 through Table 7. To learn more about expanded definitions of each metacharacter, see "Regex Metacharacters, Modes, and Constructs.”

Table 1-3. Perl character representations

Sequence	Meaning
\a	Alert (bell).
\b	Backspace; supported only in character class (outside of character class matches a word boundary).
\e	Esc character, x1B.
\n	Newline; x0A on Unix and Windows, x0D on Mac OS 9.
\r	Carriage return; x0D on Unix and Windows, x0A on Mac OS 9.
\f	Form feed, x0C.
\t	Horizontal tab, x09.
\octal	Character specified by a two- or three-digit octal code.
\xhex	Character specified by a one- or two-digit hexadecimal code.
\x{hex}	Character specified by any hexadecimal code.
\cchar	Named control character.
\N{name}	A named character specified in the Unicode standard or listed in PATH_TO_PERLLIB/unicode/Names.txt; requires use charnames ':full'.

Table 1-4. Perl character classes and class-like constructs

Class	Meaning
[...]	A single character listed, or contained in a listed range.
[^...]	A single character not listed, and not contained within a listed range.
[:class:]	POSIX-style character class valid only within a regex character class.
.	Any character except newline (unless single-line mode, /s).
\C	One byte; however, this may corrupt a Unicode character stream.
\X	Base character, followed by any number of Unicode combining characters.
\w	Word character, \p{IsWord}.
\W	Nonword character, \P{IsWord}.
\d	Digit character, \p{IsDigit}.