In short:

] and - are special in character classes.

As rules of thumb avoiding ambiguity°:

If needed ...

update

D:\>perl -dE0 Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.49_05 Editor support available. Enter h or 'h h' for help, or 'perldoc perldebug' for more help. DB<1> say "$_:\t", $_ =~ /[]abc-]/ for qw/] [ - a/ ]: 1 [: -: 1 a: 1 DB<2>

°) Otherwise ] will close the class and - will denote a range.

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery FootballPerl is like chess, only without the dice


In reply to Re: regex question Underscores, lines and paratheses. by LanX
in thread regex question Underscores, lines and paratheses. by sbrothy

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.