How can I extract a string enclosed in single quotes in Perl?

Question

How do I extract abc from 'abc' using a Perl regular expression?

I tried

echo "'abc'" | perl -ne 'if(/\'(.*)\'/) {print $1}'

but it showed:

-bash: syntax error near unexpected token `('

Answer 1

This is not a Perl problem; this is a shell problem: you cannot include single quotes into single quotes.

You have to replace each single quote with '\'' (end of single quotes, escaped single quote, and start of single quotes):

echo "'abc'" | perl -ne 'if(/'\''(.*)'\''/) {print $1}'