You can't really do what you're asking in the way you're trying to do it.

Is it the digits you're trying to capture? Or do the digits at least guarantee the start of what you want to capture? It's impossible to expect to start immediately following a character that may not be there. If it's not there, you'll get just everything instead. If 'X' is optional, it's an unreliable anchor.

Try something like this, if digits mark the start: 

m/(\d\S*)$/

[download]

I used \S* instead of \S+, so that if the string contains 'abc1' the RE will still capture the '1'. Also, you said "everything after...", so I anchored the match all the way to the end of the string with the $ metachar.


Dave

In reply to Re: Capturing everything after an optional character in a regex? by davido
in thread Capturing everything after an optional character in a regex? by Anonymous Monk

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.