On my way to Perl wisdom I am stuck with a (probably simple) problem: I try to replace all characters from the beginning and end of a string with another character but not within the string. Here is an example: 

$string = "---------xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx------yyyyyyyyyyyyyy--------";
$string =~ s/\A-+|-+$/?/g;

[download]


The output is: ?xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx------yyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

However what I want is to replace ever - with an ?. What am i doing wrong here?

I searched on the web but found no solution. Is this even possible with regular expressions?

Thank you in advance!

In reply to What is wrong here (Replacing Strin pieces) by Anonymous Monk

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