Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Sun 04/17/2022 18:43:19 C:\@Work\Perl\monks >perl use strict; use warnings; my $s = '123-abc-456'; $s =~ tr/-a-z//cd; print "'$s' \n"; $s = '123-xyz-456'; $s =~ s/[^-a-z]//g; print "'$s' \n"; ^Z '-abc-' '-xyz-'