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in reply to Re^2: Match last word in a sentence
in thread Match last word in a sentence

Is making the first part non-greedy not enough ...

my $list = "This is my list"; $list =~ m/^(.+?) # The 'rest' (Everything before last word) (\w+) # Last 'word' (string of contiguous word character +s) \W*$ # Possible non-word characters at end of string /x;

... (would it fail on some other string)?

Much later. For English language, \w is not inclusive enough (lacks hyphen) and includes too much (includes underscore & digits). Short of a proper grammar based parser, I would rather use word regex which addresses that ...

$word_re = qr{ (?: & | -? [a-zA-Z]+ [a-zA-Z-]* ) }x;

... is still incomplete as it does not deal with accented characters; periods in a title; acronyms with spaces and/or periods, among other things.