Yes regexes are optimized, if there is a leading or trailing string it's taken into consideration ( I'm to lazy to proof it with re deparse)

but this looks like a fortunate bug, because ^ is a metacharacter in some positions, it's treated differently.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
Je suis Charlie!

In reply to Re^4: Return string that starts and ends with specific characters by LanX
in thread Return string that starts and ends with specific characters by gilthoniel

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