Question

I’m currently learning about regular expressions and I’m trying to create a regex to match any legal variable name in Perl.

This is what I wrote so far:

^\$[A-Za-z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*

The only problem is the regex returns true for special signs, for example the string $a& will return true.

What I did wrong?

Thanks!
Rotem

Answer 1

You need a $ at the end, otherwise it’s just matches as far as it can and ignores the rest. So it should be:

^\$[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9]*$