Perl Regular Expression

In fact, you've already seen a number regular expression without knowing what they were. The split function that has appeared in various programs takes a regular expression as its first argument. Remember that the split function searches through a string for a particular substring and then splits the string into smaller strings at the positions where the substring is found. So far, you've had to go faith that you express these arguments with a slash (/), followed by the exact text followed by another slash.

@TheFields = split(^t/, $TheRecord);

This code will return a list of strings in $TheRecord, where each string is the text between the tab characters (remember that V indicates a tab character), Thus, if $ TheRecord contains 'Speakers," followed by a tab character, followed by "2", followed by another tab character, followed by "High", the split function above would return

('Speakers,' '2', 'High')

Thus, the simplest kind of regular expression is just the exact characters you want to specify, such as a single tab character in the preceding example. You can put more than one character between the slashes. For example, assume that you have a database in a text in which you use three hash characters (###) between fields instead of the tab character. Thus, if $TheRecord contains 'Speakers###2###High", you would use

@TheFields = split (/###/, $TheRecord);

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