Many built-in functions accept a regex pattern as an argument. Furthermore, any subroutine can accept a string yet treat it as a regex pattern. This could be done, for example, by passing the string to the match operator (m//
). Because regex patterns are encoded as regular strings, it is tempting to assume that a string literal will be treated as if a regex that matched only that string literal were supplied. Unexpected function behavior can result if the string contains characters that have special meanings when the string is treated as a regex pattern. Therefore, do not pass strings that are not clearly regex patterns to a function that takes a regex.
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my $data = 'Tom$Dick$Harry'; my @names = split( m/\$/, $data); |
Exceptions
STR31-PL-EX0: A string literal may be passed to a function if it normally takes a regex pattern but provides special behavior for that string. For example, the perlfunc manpage [Wall 2011] says, regarding PATTERN
, the first argument to split()
:
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