This appears to contain a bug, revealed when you change the print lines as shown below:
use strict;
use warnings;
my $list = "This is my list";
$list =~ /
^(.+) # The 'rest' (Everything before last word)
(\w+) # Last 'word' (string of contiguous word characters)
\W*$ # Possible non-word characters at end of string
/x;
my $last = $2;
my $the_rest = $1;
print "the_rest='$the_rest'\n";
print "last='$last'\n";
Running this produces:
the_rest='This is my lis'
last='t'
There are many ways to fix. Here is one way (adding a \b assertion):
$list =~ /
^(.+) # The 'rest' (Everything before last word)
\b(\w+) # Last 'word' (string of contiguous word characters)
\W*$ # Possible non-word characters at end of string
/x;
Alternative fixes welcome.
