ShortCut[RegEx]: x-modifier

Independent of your programming experiences, you should have learned that regular expressions are more or less write-only.

Write-only? What is he talking about!? Actually I revisited some Perl code with a relatively short reg-ex. Do you think I was able to understand what I’ve thought when I created that piece of code? Not in the slightest!

But there is a smart modifier, that enables you to comment your regular expressions: x. With /x all white-spaces are ignored and with an unescaped # the rest of the line is treated as a comment. I found a nice example, what do you think is this expression for:

/^1?$|^(11+?)\\1+$/

No idea? Don’t even bother, I’m also stumped… Here is the solution: It’s used to check for prime numbers ;-) Using the x-mod the explanation looks much more readable (via Neil Kandalgaonkar):

/
  ^1?$   # matches beginning, optional 1, ending.
         # thus matches the empty string and "1".
         # this matches the cases where N was 0 and 1
         # and since it matches, will not flag those as prime.
|   # or...
  ^                # match beginning of string
    (              # begin first stored group
     1             # match a one
      1+?          # then match one or more ones, minimally.
    )              # end storing first group
    \\1+            # match the first group, repeated one or more times.
  $                # match end of string.
/x

So you see, it’s really helpful to use the x-modifier. At least for your own understanding :-P

A bit more explanation can be found on Perl.com.