After looking at your regexp I took to simplifying my needs with:

$word =~ s/^[^\w\d]+(.*?)[^\w\d]+$/$1/;

My intention is remove everything that is not a letter or number up to the first letter, pull everything up till the last non letter or digit. When I look at it it makes sense, but my testing it does not work.

Update

It works on the simple example I gave for 'Wilmer!'. I was running word count with a script as the input and the odd results I was seeing were the syntax in the script. I apologize.

In reply to Re^2: stripped punctuation by thealienz1
in thread stripped punctuation by thealienz1

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