Perl regular expressions: Common escape sequences

By Alvin Alexander. Last updated: June 4, 2016

You can do many crazy things with Perl regular expressions, but many times you just need to use an escape character (or escape sequence) in a regular expression. I'm often asked what escape sequences you can use in Perl regular expressions, so without any further ado, here is a simple list of "special" characters (such as the [Tab] character) can be matched by the Perl regular expressions:

Character Sequence	What it Matches
`\a`	Alarm
`\d`	A digit, the same as [0-9]
`\D`	A non-digit
`\e`	Escape
`\f`	Form feed
`\n`	Newline character
`\r`	Carriage return
`\s`	A whitespace character, the same as [ \t\n\r\f]
`\S`	A non-whitespace character
`\t`	Tab
`\w`	A word character, the same as [a-zA-Z_0-9]
`\W`	A nonword character