Actually Perl Beginner could understand this.. its a very simple regular expression for a match..

^ matches the beginning of string
oops thats /\  not ^
m/<stuff>/  define a match string as defined by <stuff>
in this case <stuff> is \<[a-z]\w*\>
(m is not strictly required.. but my nedit syntax highlighter always recognizes match expressions if you use m/ -- so thats now my habit.)

so \< escapes a normally special character "<" so that you are looking for something between <>  for instance the CONTENTS of an xml tag
[a-z] requires the first letter to be in this range of characters - (lower case) - so tags starting with spaces, or CAPS or numbers DON'T MATCH
\w - Allows any of the legal "word" characters, lowercase, uppercase, numbers  -- and maybe "_" ?
* allows repeats of \w
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I'll recommend investing in the "programming perl" book by larry Wall et al.
Disclaimer.. this is all from Memory.. and MY copy of the book is on my desk at the office.. - there are 20 forums on Perl coding similar to DG for analog / RF design.. and ALL the documentation is on the web too. so If I got it wrong from memory sorry.. I'm not going to google this answer for you..
jbd

neoflash wrote on Aug 31^st, 2008, 1:19am:


It is weird that when I try to search /\w, it returned only "w" matched results. Not expected word character. why?