Well, from your output, you appear not to get any spurious characters anyway.

When I said above that Data::Dumper was not the issue, what I meant was that I was just using it to display the output. I originally observed the problem because the characters added to my regex were **, which caused the regex to be invalid (luckily, or I might not have spotted it for a while).

However, Data::Dumper may yet be involved. When I run the following code: 

use Data::Dumper;
my $re_bad  = qr'xx([A-Z$#@_!]*) (?! [A-Za-z0-9$#@_] )'x;
print $re_bad;

[download]

the output is: 

(?x-ism:xx([A-Z$#@_!]*) (?! [A-Za-z0-9$#@_] )#
)

[download]

Note the spurious hash (or pound, if you prefer :-) at the end. Given the following code: 

my $re_bad  = qr'xx([A-Z$#@_!]*) (?! [A-Za-z0-9$#@_] )'x;
print $re_bad;

[download]

the output is: 

(?x-ism:xx([A-Z$#@_!]*) (?! [A-Za-z0-9$#@_] ) 
)

[download]

However, this does not yet prove that Data::Dumper is the culprit. Given the sporadic nature of the symptoms, it may well be that simply using any module of the right "size" will produce the error.

Kevin

In reply to Re: Re: Worrying regex issue with 5.8.0 by ruscoekm
in thread Worrying regex issue with 5.8.0 by ruscoekm

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