Hello. I don't usually post to forums, but I am somewhat stuck. I am trying to find all matches in a string that begins with "| |" (quotations not included). I have tried doing:
if ($line =~ m/^\\\|\s\\\|/)
and that didn't work. I'm not sure if anyone has any tips or pointers, but any help would be appreciated. Thanks!
You are escaping the pipe one time too many, effectively escaping the backslash instead.
print "YES!" if ($line =~ m/^\|\s\|/);
Pipe character should be escaped with a single backslash in a Perl regex. (Perl regexes are a bit different from POSIX regexes. If you're using this in, say, grep, things would be a bit different.) If you're specifically looking for a space between them, then use an unescaped space. They're perfectly acceptable in a Perl regex. Here's a brief test program:
my @lines = <DATA>;
for (@lines) {
print if /^\| \|/;
}
__DATA__
| | Good - space
|| Bad - no space
| | Bad - tab
| | Bad - beginning space
Bad - no bars
Remove the ^ and the double back-slashes. The ^ forces the string to be at the beginning of the string. Since you're looking for all matches in one string, that's probably not what you want.
m/\|\s\|/