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Perl | Grouping and Alternation in Regex

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Regex or Regular Expressions are an important part of Perl Programming. It is used for searching the specified text pattern. In this, set of characters together form the search pattern. It is also known as regexp. Working with regex might become complex with more and more addition in functionalities. To reduce the complexity, Perl provides us with more operations such as Alternation and Grouping.
 

Alternation

The name itself suggests the mechanism it does, first and foremost its like a (&&) operator which appears in ‘C’ programming language. The ‘&&’ operator in C works as until it finds that all the conditional statements are true it won’t return 1 and returns 0 as soon as it finds a false statement. The alternation in Perl works in both ways simultaneously. Alternation can be done using either the metacharacters ‘|’ or ‘[]’. Following examples will make things clear:
Example 1: 
 

perl




#!/usr/bin/perl
 
# Initializing the string and checking it
# against few search patterns
my $str = "geeksforgeeks rocks...";
 
# prints 1 due to no match (=0)
print "1\n" if (($str =~ /gek|for/) == 0);
 
# for word search
if($str =~ /geek|for/)
{
    print "I found $&.\n";
}
else
{
    print "no match"
}


Output: 

1
I found geek.

 

So, in the above example, it first checks for ‘geek’ and finds a match in the first alternate pattern returns 1 as soon as it finds a match. But it also checks for ‘for’ too and if it is not present in the string it won’t be bothered as it already returned the match status. If ‘for’ is a match, it checks whether ‘for’ is appearing in the least position of the string as ‘g’ in ‘geeks’ appears at position 0 and ‘f’ in ‘for’ appears at position 5, ‘geek’ gets stored in the last match pattern. Check out the following example:
 

 $& - Contains the string matched by the last pattern match.

Example 2: 
 

perl




#!/usr/bin/perl
 
# Initializing the string and checking it
# against few search patterns
my $str = "geeksforgeeks rocks...";
print "1\n" if ($str =~ /for|eeks|rock|ge/);
 
# | for word search
if($str =~ /for|eeks|rock|ge/)
{
    print "I found $&.\n";
}
 
# for single character search
if ($str =~ /[gfrkc]/)
{
    print "$&"
}


Output: 

1
I found ge.
g

 

Grouping

Grouping is used to search for a pattern bounded with similar words or patterns, in the beginning, end or in the middle and it also returns the least positioned pattern. Grouping is done using metacharacter ‘()’. Following is an example which will make things clear: 
Example 1:
 

perl




#!/usr/bin/perl
# Initializing the string and checking it
# against few search patterns
my $str = "Blackbackground Brownbackground";
print "1\n" if ($str =~ /(Bron|Back)[a-z]+/);
if ($str =~ /(Brown|Black)[a-z]+/)
{
    print "I found $&.\n";
}
 
else
{
    print "no match"
}


Output: 

I found Blackbackground.

 

For better understanding check out the following example: 
 

perl




#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
 
# Initializing the string and checking it
# against few searching patterns
 
# array of strings
my @mail = ('Ab-@gmail.com',
            'd.f@yahoo.com',
            '0b_f@bing.com',
            'jet@hotmail.con',
            's/s@otmail.com');
 
for(@mail)
{
    # search pattern to check valid mail
    # service providers followed with '.com'
    print "Valid : $_\n"
    if($_ =~ /[a-zA-Z0-9-._]+@(gmail|yahoo|bing|hotmail)(.com)$/)
}


Output: 

Valid : Ab-@gmail.com
Valid : d.f@yahoo.com
Valid : 0b_f@bing.com

 



Last Updated : 03 Feb, 2022
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