I'm having difficulty matching the last character in a string if it happens to be a \n. I would have naively thought m@(.)$@s would work, but instead if the last character is \n it matches the character preceding. If I explicitly use \n it will match, but I can't seem to do it conditionally. I tried using an OR, but behaves the same as using the . (dot). I tried using m flag (without g), thinking perl starts evaluation at the end of the string and I might get it that way.

Here is what I've tried:

print('String: a\nb\nc\n' . "\n");
my $text_1 = "a\nb\nc\n";
$text_1 =~ m@(.)$@s;
print("----------\n>" . $1 . "<\n");
$text_1 =~ m@(\n)$@s;
print("----------\n>" . $1 . "<\n");
$text_1 =~ m@(\n|.)$@s;
print("----------\n>" . $1 . "<\n");

print("\n" . 'String: a\nb\nc\n - multiline match:' . "\n");
$text_1 = "a\nb\nc\n";
$text_1 =~ m@(.)$@sm;
print("----------\n>" . $1 . "<\n");
$text_1 =~ m@(\n)$@sm;
print("----------\n>" . $1 . "<\n");
$text_1 =~ m@(\n|.)$@sm;
print("----------\n>" . $1 . "<\n");

[download]
Here's what I get: 
String: a\nb\nc\n
----------
>c<
----------
>
<
----------
>c<

String: a\nb\nc\n - multiline match:
----------
>a<
----------
>
<
----------
>a<

[download]
My searching on this issue has not come up with any answers.

Help?

In reply to How to match last character of string, even if it happens to be a newline? by Allasso

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