Character Classes in Regex

Learn to tame the wild regex beasts with character classes! Perl has got its own

Why Bother with Character Classes?

In regex, character classes are a powerful tool for matching a set of specific characters. But why use them, you ask?

Well, let's say you need to match any of the letters 'a', 'b', or 'c'. You could write a separate regex for each one, but that's just lazy. With character classes, you can match any of those three in one fell swoop!

And that's not all, folks! Character classes can also match any of a range of numbers, or even any digit or word character. The possibilities are endless!

Examples and Tips

Here are some examples to get you started:

Matching any of 'a', 'b', or 'c': [abc]

Matching any digit: \d

Matching any word character (alphanumeric plus underscore): \w

See how Perl does it.