Sams Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days, Second Edition

The Whys and Wherefores of Pattern Matching

Pattern matching is the technique of searching a string containing text or binary data for some set of characters based on a specific search pattern. When you search for a string of characters in a file using the Find command in your word processor, or when you use a search engine to look for something on the Web, you're using a simple version of pattern matching: your criteria is “find these characters.” In those environments, you can often customize your criteria in particular ways, for example, to search for this or that, to search for this or that but not the other thing, to search for whole words only, or to search only for those words that are 12 points and underlined. As you've seen from the ...