Comments on: Regular Expression Anchor Mnemonic

By: Jon Fuller

Jon Fuller — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:50:05 +0000

When I read this Monday morning I thought ‘heh, clever, but I never use RegEx’. Then Monday afternoon as I’m writing some RegEx I think to myself ‘which goes first? ^ or $ ?.

Thanks! Saved me from a quick google.

By: Robby Slaughter

Robby Slaughter — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 02:33:03 +0000

I always remember that the caret is also used to represent control characters, as in ^M and comes at the beginning. And the last thing to happen after finishing work is that you are paid; hence, $ at the end.

Stupid, but it works for me.

@robbyslaughter

By: Elijah Miller

Elijah Miller — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:40:49 +0000

It’s funny you bring this up, because I have trouble remembering the function of these characters too. I first used regular expressions heavily with Perl which has $’s littered in front of scalars. I imagine both /$a/ and /a$/, but when I see /$a/ I think $a is a variable reference, so it must be /a$/.

Overly complicated? Yes, but it gets the job done!