How does Perl handle regular expressions and pattern matching?

Perl has a built-in support for regular expressions and pattern matching, which makes it a powerful tool for text processing and manipulation tasks. Regular expressions are a way to describe patterns in text, and are used to search for, match, and manipulate strings.

In Perl, regular expressions are enclosed in forward slashes (/) and can be used in a variety of ways, such as in the match operator (=~) and the substitute operator (s///). The match operator is used to check if a regular expression matches a certain string, while the substitute operator is used to replace matched text with new text.

Perl also has a number of built-in functions that can be used to work with regular expressions, such as split(), grep(), and map(). These functions can be used to perform complex operations on strings and lists of strings.

Perl also has advanced regular expression features such as look ahead and look behind, conditional patterns, and recursion. These features make it possible to write powerful regular expressions that can match complex patterns in text.

In summary, Perl has a robust support for regular expressions and pattern matching, which makes it a powerful tool for text processing and manipulation tasks. The built-in regular expression operators and functions, along with the advanced regular expression features, make it easy to write powerful and efficient regular expressions in Perl.