[prog] On Perl

[Jenny Brown]

On Fri, 11 Oct 2002, kansas_kennedy at phreaker.net wrote:

> Just wanted to ask the more experieced if it is necessary to memorize all
> the regex syntax. My understanding is if I can do it from Learning Perl it
> will suffice and the Programming Perl's regex will come in handy over the
> years of usage.


What you'll probably find is that you work out of the book and reference
manuals for a while (1-6 months) and then just from using it, the pieces
of regular expressions you use a lot will find their way into permanent
memory.  For instance, start of line, end of line, match white space,
match any character, () and ?, and whatever else you tend to use.  The rest
of the items you'll continue to look up on the rare occassions you need them;
that's what the man pages are for.

Don't force the memorization.  Just use it a lot, and the common
patterns will come on their own.  Do, however, make sure you understand
how the pieces affect each other; the logical rules of what (.*?) does
and such.  You don't have to learn it all at once.


Jenny