- regexp STRING #!optional IGNORECASE IGNORESPACE UTF8procedure
Returns a precompiled regular expression object for string. The optional arguments IGNORECASE, IGNORESPACE and UTF8 specify whether the regular expression should be matched with case- or whitespace-differences ignored, or whether the string should be treated as containing UTF-8 encoded characters, respectively.
Note that code that uses regular expressions heavily should always use them in precompiled form, which is likely to be much faster than passing strings to any of the regular-expression routines described below.