Favorite syntactic sugar feature: the /x modifier which makes the regex ignore spaces and comments, meaning you can break your regex into multiple lines and comment them.

Have you ever read O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Friedl? He does a deep dive into the weird guts of regex modifiers.

I was obsessed with that book one summer and wrote a bunch of parsers after learning incremental techniques (/o I think), and then 8 months later I could no longer remember how anything that I wrote worked. Lol me.

Friedl's masterpiece was my introduction to server-side programming in 2000. I'd been doing front-end for a few years with Dreamweaver and I was looking-up it's find & replace features in "Dreamweaver Bible 8" where regexes were mentioned as the ultimate weapon. "Mastering Regular Expressions" was referenced in a footnote and fortunately my local library had a copy. My mind was blown. Regex symbols were just so powerful and the examples were mainly written in Perl which added even more power to them. The book was part of O'Reilly's Perl bookshelf so in addition to Friedl's book I bought the other Perl classics - "Programming Perl", "Perl Cookbook", "Mastering Algorithms with Perl" and "Learning Perl". With CPAN downloaded to my local disk I felt like a hitch-hiker setting out on a journey around the world needing nothing more than Perl in my backpack. Those were the days. Now I have to download 200Mb of node_modules before I can get started.

Recently I found some old floppy drives at the back of a drawer. I manager to find an usb disk drive, inserted the floppy, what do I find? Sure enough, Perl code I've written back in 2000! Indeed, those were the days :)

If it was back-end website code it probably used Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm module which was used everywhere though it was a bit of a beast with frequent security updates. I later progressed to CGI::Application for an app which ran a business for 12 years before I converted it to Rails. I always thought Mojolicious was a great Perl web framework but unfortunately it landed just as Rails was picking-up steam.

FWIW, this is the default in Raku regular expressions.

Oh, thank you, didn't know that!

Raku is Perl programming language so that makes sense.

If you're interested in improved regular expressions, I wuold suggest you have a look at Raku's regular expressions and grammars (formerly known as Perl 6): https://docs.raku.org/language/regexes

Agreed. Regex is a “part of the language” not a bolt on library like you have in Python. It’s one of those cases where you don’t even know how crap regex is in another language if you’ve never used Perl.

I mentioned Boost's Regex in C++ (boost is essentially a different language), but I didn't bother to mention my experiments with regex in C, for example:

http://web.archive.org/web/20160308115653/http://peope.net/o...

I mean, you can do it, it just lacks elegance. And TBH, I still prefer C for lots of things.

You should check out janet-lang.org. It's got built in peg parsing.

Awk and Ruby aren't on your list, any experience with those that you could compare/contrast with Perl?

Awk is very similar in syntax, but doesn't provide the sophistication of match vs subst, and doesn't support suffix modifiers.

I only used Ruby briefly over 20 years ago so I can't comment.

I do recommend Haskell. (But do not go into regexes first!)

But even though it has a similar powerful set of operations for regular expressions, people mostly don't use it, because there are better ways to deal with text.

Funny you should mention Haskell as it was used to bootstrap one of the early versions of Perl 6 if I remember.

Correct:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pugs_(programming)

You would like Crystal, it has similar regexes