I grepped my collection of text files (all English-language downloads from gutenberg.org) for -' and only found forty-'leven and fellow-'prentice. I've updated tybalt89's solution with your improvement.

The contents of $3 will contain a final space if one is present, so {|o'clock|--} is consistent with the instructions.

In reply to Re^3: Problem with a text-parsing regex by ibm1620
in thread Problem with a text-parsing regex by ibm1620

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