I think the set manipulation operations used in the approach of Re: Exception from a character class were only introduced with Perl version 5.16.

The following approach uses only 'old-style' character classes. It depends on a kind of double-negation to match all characters that are not non-digits and also not specific digits. (\P{Whatever} is the inverse class of  \p{Whatever} – note P versus p.) Of course, adapt this to your punctuation application. 

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = 'abc 123 def 45678 g 90 h';
 print qq{'$s'};
 ;;
 $s =~ s{ [^\P{PosixDigit}257] }{-}xmsg;
 print qq{'$s'};
"
'abc 123 def 45678 g 90 h'
'abc -2- def -5-7- g -- h'

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In reply to Re: Exception from a character class by AnomalousMonk
in thread Exception from a character class by pirkil

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