Rather than trying to roll your own regex (and depending on what you're trying to do with this next) you probably want to look at CPAN and search for NLP modules (Natural Language Processing) instead. Those are likely going to do what you want WRT removing not-words as well as being able to give you more info about the words/tokens it extracts.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

In reply to Re: Problem with a text-parsing regex by Fletch
in thread Problem with a text-parsing regex by ibm1620

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