Perl Best Practices [Electronic resources]

12.10. Named Characters

Prefer named characters to escaped metacharacters .

As an alternative to the previous guideline, Perl 5.6 (and later) supports named characters in regexes. As previously discussed^[*], this mechanism is much better for "unprintable" components of a regex. For example, instead of:

^[*] "Escaped Characters" in Chapter 4.

if ($escape_seq =~ /\177 \006 \030 Z/xms) {   # Octal DEL-ACK-CAN-Z
blink(182);
}

use:

use charnames qw( :full );
if ($escape_seq =~ m/\N{DELETE} \N{ACKNOWLEDGE} \N{CANCEL} Z/xms) {
blink(182);
} 

Note, however that named whitespace characters are treated like ordinary whitespace (i.e., they're ignored) under the /x flag:

use charnames qw( :full );
# and later...
$name =~ m{ harry \N{SPACE} s \N{SPACE} truman     # harrystruman
| harry \N{SPACE} j \N{SPACE} potter     # harryjpotter
}ixms;

You would still need to put them in characters classes to make them match:

use charnames qw( :full );
# and later...
$name =~ m{ harry [\N{SPACE}] s [\N{SPACE}] truman     
# harry s truman
| harry [\N{SPACE}] j [\N{SPACE}] potter     
# harry j potter
}ixms;