Question

Today I came across two different syntaxes for a Perl regular expression match.

#I have a date string
my $time = '2012-10-29';

#Already familiar "m//":
$t =~ m/^(\d{4}-\d\d-\d\d)$/

#Completely new to me m##.
$t =~ m#^(\d{4}-\d\d-\d\d)#/

Now what is the difference between /expression/ and #expression#?

Answer 1

As everone else said, you can use any delimiter after the m.

/ has one special feature: you can use it by itself, e.g.

$string =~ /regexp/;

is equivalent to:

$string =~ m/regexp/;