Regular Expression: Perl and vi

[googler]

I am trying to create a list of the differences in regular expression
for Perl and vi. I have been using both Perl and vi, and get confused
by this sometimes. There are a few that I already know of.

1. In Perl, characters like (, { etc when used as metacharacter can be
used by themselves (without using a \). In vi, they should be escaped
with a \. (Question: what is the full list of the metacharacters where
we see this difference?)

2. In Perl, non-greedy search can be done by using a ? character
(like .*?). In vi, this is done as .\{-}

3. In Perl, zero or one match can be achieved by putting a ? character
after the pattern. In vi, this is done by \=

4. In Perl, the RE for matching only a particular word is \bword\b .
In vi, it is \<word\> (Question: does \<word\> work for Perl?)

Please add to the list if you know of any difference that I missed.

Thanks.

 

[John W. Krahn]

I am trying to create a list of the differences in regular expression
for Perl and vi. I have been using both Perl and vi, and get confused
by this sometimes. There are a few that I already know of.

1. In Perl, characters like (, { etc when used as metacharacter can be
used by themselves (without using a \). In vi, they should be escaped
with a \. (Question: what is the full list of the metacharacters where
we see this difference?)

2. In Perl, non-greedy search can be done by using a ? character
(like .*?). In vi, this is done as .\{-}

3. In Perl, zero or one match can be achieved by putting a ? character
after the pattern. In vi, this is done by \=

4. In Perl, the RE for matching only a particular word is \bword\b .
In vi, it is \<word\> (Question: does \<word\> work for Perl?)

Please add to the list if you know of any difference that I missed.

Get the book:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex3/index.html

It should explain most if not all of the differences.



John

 

[Brian Blackmore]

Get the book:

It should explain most if not all of the differences.

:help perl-patterns

 

[John M. Gamble]

:help perl-patterns

Which does work in vim, but the OP may not be using that version of vi.