in reply to Remove all non-numeric characters except for an optional negative sign (-)

Use ? for an optional part of a regex:
#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; use feature qw{ say }; for my $s (qw( AS:i:-4 AS:i:4 )) { say $s =~ /-?\d+/g; }

See Quantifiers for details.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord }map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,