What happened when you tried it?

You did try it, didn't you? Or is that why you didn't tell us the actual results of your code snippet?

And did you read http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html (search for "metacharacters")?

"In particular the following metacharacters have their standard egrep-ish meanings: \ Quote the next metacharacter ^ Match the beginning of the line ... By default, the "^" character is guaranteed to match only the beginning of the string..."
and, from http://perldoc.perl.org/perlre.html ({search for "Assertions"):
\G Match only at pos() (e.g. at the end-of-match position of prior m//g) .... The \G assertion can be used to chain global matches (using m//g), as described in Regexp Quote-Like Operators in perlop. It is also useful when writing lex -like scanners, when you have several patterns that you want to match against consequent substrings of your string; see the previous reference. The actual location where \G will match can also be influenced by using pos() as an lvalue: see pos.

But, as the docs make clear, the caret limits the regex engine's attempts to match your expression, unless that matches at the beginning of the string.

You need to read the docs (and understand them! THEN, if you don't understand something, come back with code that reflects info from the docs and tell us how the output doesn't match your understanding of what you've studied.


Spirit of the Monastery


In reply to Re: anchor ^ and \G by ww
in thread anchor ^ and \G by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.