Get the manual and read the perlre part. Understanding regular expressions is essential for text analysis.
Code:
… || $FORM{'data8'} !~ /^[0-9A-Za-z]*$/ || …
This subexpression evaluates to true if $FORM{'data8'}
does not match (!~) the regular expression /^[0-9A-Za-z]*$/, which means:
- ^ — start of text,
- [0-9A-Za-z] — digit or letter,
- * — repeated 0 or more times,
- $ — end of text.