Quite right, very true, didn't think of that.

What if we add a not-whitespace-either to the character class?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $words='test Buffy testament Anya tot Willow tesseract
 Faith tent this is a problem right?';
$words =~ s/\b(t[^t\s]+t)\b/$1 eq "test" ? $1  : ''/ge; 
print $words;
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