It's a little more than that. Should it be (?:\\\W|.) instead?

If so, as written, it would be interpreted as non-capturing parenthesis, matching either a backslash and a nonword character or a single character.

Otherwise, it's (an optional colon followed by a backslash and a non-word character) or (a single character).

In reply to Re: Alternation in Effective Perl Programming Example by chromatic
in thread Alternation in Effective Perl Programming Example by Carl-Joseph

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