The second program says yes if there is at least one character not in the class, not if all characters are not in the class.

You want something like: 

...
if (/^[^yhnujmikolp]+$/i) {
...

[download]
which says "from the beginning to the ending, are they all not in this class".

This is a common problem when people negate things too much: the negations stack up in the wrong direction. Me, I avoid that kind of regex, and ask for what I want, which will also be faster: 

@ARGV = qw(/usr/dict/words);
my $longest = "";
while (<>) {
  next unless length > length $longest; # too short
  next if /[^qwertasdfgzxcvb\n]/i; # wrong hand
  $longest = $_;
}
print $longest;

[download]
And this finds "aftereffect", as you noted. But with a lot less code, as I'm often prone to do. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

In reply to Re: charachter classes by merlyn
in thread charachter classes, and a misunderstanding... by eduardo

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