About Perl's Binding Operator
Published on 20th May 2009 Estimated Reading Time: 1 minuteWhile this piece is as much an aide de memoire for myself as anything else, putting it here seems worthwhile if it answers questions for others. The binding operators, =~
or !~
, come in handy when you are framing conditional statements in Perl using Regular Expressions, for example, testing whether x =~ /\d+/
or not. The =~ variant is also used for changing strings using the s/[pattern1]/[pattern2]/
regular expression construct (here, s
stands for "substitute"). What has brought this to mind is that I wanted to ensure that something was done for strings that did not contain a certain pattern, and that's where the !~
binding operator came in useful; ^~
might have come to mind for some reason, but it wasn't what I needed.