Laziness is one of the three virtues!

[^a-z-A-Z] can be more succintly put as \W . (That's a capital W in case your font doesn't make it clear.)

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Re: Laziness is one of the three virtues! by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jul 22, 2002 at 20:41 UTC
That's a common misconception regarding `\w` and `\W`. The "word" characters (depending upon locale) are typically letters, underscores, and digits. Thus, the `\W` will not remove underscores or digits from the end. `$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[^a-zA-Z]+$//;print' foobar $ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/\W+$//;print' foobar_ $ perl -e '$_="foobar9";s/\W+$//;print' foobar9` [download] Update: I pointed out a bug in your code only to realize a bug in mine :) My first example doesn't respect locale settings. I should be using POSIX character classes. `$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[[:^alpha:]]+$//;print' foobar` [download] Cheers, Ovid Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: Laziness is one of the three virtues!
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jul 22, 2002 at 20:41 UTC

That's a common misconception regarding \w and \W. The "word" characters (depending upon locale) are typically letters, underscores, and digits. Thus, the \W will not remove underscores or digits from the end.

$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[^a-zA-Z]+$//;print'
foobar

$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/\W+$//;print'
foobar_

$ perl -e '$_="foobar9";s/\W+$//;print'
foobar9
[download]

Update: I pointed out a bug in your code only to realize a bug in mine :) My first example doesn't respect locale settings. I should be using POSIX character classes.

$ perl -e '$_="foobar_";s/[[:^alpha:]]+$//;print'
foobar
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just click on the the link and check out our stats.

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