According to perlldoc – I should not get a match if $word is say 509992. It should only match if it is at least 2 digits and no more than 4. See this snippit:

my $word = $ARGV[0];
print "It matches\n" if $word =~ /\d{2,4}/;

Yet if I feed this something whacky like 50401030303 – it WILL match and print out "It matches". Is this guy’s perlrequick document just wrong on this point or have I futzed something up?

http://perldoc.perl.org/perlrequick.html

Good thought…but even one digit over matches in appropriately:

23:03:48 $ ./matchYear 19996
It matches
that is – inappropriately.
Haha…even this matches:
23:06:40 $ ./matchYear 123457812349871324981743098174309871324HOHOHO
It matches

If I feed it only 1 digit or no digits it’s a no-match or error respectively.
Ok – here’s the answer from a helpful usenet subscriber:

It does not say that the
entire pattern will not match if $word contains more than 4 digits. It
says that THAT TOKEN will not match more than 4 digits. To better see
what’s happening:

print "Before: ”, Match: ”, After: ”\n" if $word =~
/(.*?)(\d{2,4})(.*)/;

That will place whatever \d{2,4} matched into , and everything before
that in and everything after that in .

If you really want to only match if the string contains a max of 4
digits, you have to insure that the digit string is neither preceded
nor followed by a digit:

print "It matches\n" if $word =~ /(?<!\d)\d{2,4}(?!\d)/;

(Look up in that documentation the section on Look-behind and
Look-ahead assertions).

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