8.5 What's Next?
In the next chapter, you will harness the power of pattern matching by learning Perl's plethora of regular expression metacharacters. You will learn how to anchor patterns, how to search for alternating patterns, whitespace characters, sets of characters, repeating patterns, etc. You will learn about greedy metacharacters and how to control them. You will learn about capturing and grouping patterns, to look ahead and behind. By the time you have completed this chapter, you should be able to search for data by regular expressions based on a specific criterion in order to validate the data and to modify the text that was found.