Regular expressions are enclosed in matching characters with a prepended re. The conventional character for enclosing a regular expression is a slash (/), but a pound sign (#) can be used as well: re/.../ or re#...#. KRL regular expressions closely follow the conventions for Perl regular expressions.1 The following modifiers may appear after the closing character:
- i. The i modifier makes the regular expression case insensitive.
- g. The g modifier applies the regular expression globally.
For example, the following code replaces the first instance of foo in p with bar:
p.replace(re/foo/, "bar")
In contrast, the following code replaces all instances of foo in p with bar:
p.replace(re/foo/g, "bar")