If the initial arguments to regexp start with - then they are treated as switches. The following switches are currently supported:
-all | All ranges in string that match exp are found and substitution is performed for each of these ranges. Without this switch only the first matching range is found and substituted. If -all is specified, then "&" and "\en" sequences are handled for each substitution using the information from the corresponding match. |
-nocase | Upper-case characters in string will be converted to lower-case before matching against exp; however, substitutions specified by subSpec use the original unconverted form of Istring |
-- | Marks the end of switches. The argument following this one will be treated as exp even if it starts with a - |
See the manual entry for regexp for details on the interpretation of regular expressions.