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Asked: 2026-05-27T07:17:36+00:00

Emacs is confusing syntax after a line like fileparse($file, qr\.[^.]+$); And thinks the rest

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Emacs is confusing syntax after a line like

fileparse($file, qr"\.[^.]+$");

And thinks the rest of the file is a string. How do I fix this?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Emacs is confused by the quotes in the qr expression. The standard regular expression delimiter (/) works:

    fileparse($file, qr/\.[^.]+$/);

    In fact, almost anything else seems to work.

    fileparse($file, qr{(\.[^.]+$/});
fileparse($file, qr*\.[^.]+$*);
fileparse($file, qr#\.[^.]+$#);

    My version of VIM doesn’t get confused by the quotes, but I know that older versions of VIM did. Putting quotes is really confusing because it makes the qr expression look like a string (which it isn’t). It’s usually bad policy to use quotes as delimiters in regular expressions even though it’s technically legal.

    However, the really important question is what’s fileparse? That’s not a standard Perl function. I am assuming that this is imported from File::Basename? Would that be correct?

    According to the documentation I have, the second argument in fileparse is suppose to be an array and not a quoted regular expression.

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