7.9. Useful Escape Sequences
Perl has several escape sequences which are specific to regular expressions. Here is a list of some of the more useful ones:
\w
- matches a word character, equivalent to[A-Za-z_]
. The corresponding sequence -\W
matches a non-word character.\s
- matches a whitespace character, usually space and tab.\S
matches a non-whitespace character.\d
- matches a digit. Equivalent to[0-9]
.\D
matches a non-digit.\b
- matches a word boundary. This sequence in fact has a zero width but it is nevertheless highly useful.\B
matches something that is not a word boundary.