I thought I understood regexes, but here is one I just can't figure out.

I wanted to break words at single quotes, so my idea was to use

@words = $word =~ /^(\w+')([\w-]+)$/

Works fine. Then I discovered that sometimes there are words with more than one ' in them, so I changed it to

@words = $word =~ /^(\w+')+([\w-]+)$/

inserted a + after the first group. I'd expect this to break e.g. "d'aujourd'hui" into "d':aujourd':hui", but what it does is it gives only the last two parts: "aujourd':hui".

Why?!?

pike

P.S. I know I could use split to get what I want:

@words = split /(?<=')(?!s$)/, $word

but I'd just like to know whats wrong with my regex...

In reply to regex capturing problem by pike

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