If you're looking for a single-byte (ASCII) character that isn't "text" and isn't clobbered by  s/\W//g, here's the way to find out what your options are: 
perl -e '$_ = join "", map { chr() } 0..255; s/\W//g; print' | od -txC
+ -a

[download]
(That assumes a unix environment -- it uses bash-style quoting, and the unix "od" command to view in detail what character codes are printed as output.) The output is: 
0000000    30  31  32  33  34  35  36  37  38  39  41  42  43  44  45 
+ 46
           0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   A   B   C   D   E  
+ F
0000020    47  48  49  4a  4b  4c  4d  4e  4f  50  51  52  53  54  55 
+ 56
           G   H   I   J   K   L   M   N   O   P   Q   R   S   T   U  
+ V
0000040    57  58  59  5a  5f  61  62  63  64  65  66  67  68  69  6a 
+ 6b
           W   X   Y   Z   _   a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j  
+ k
0000060    6c  6d  6e  6f  70  71  72  73  74  75  76  77  78  79  7a 
+   
           l   m   n   o   p   q   r   s   t   u   v   w   x   y   z  
+  
0000077

[download]
As advertised in the perlre man page, the only things that do not match "\W" are digits, letters and underscore.

If you're willing to tread into utf8 wide-character territory, there are lots of options -- things that don't match \W but that probably would not be considered "alphanumeric" by most people. Compared to the one-liner above, I was actually a little surprisedby the effect of this relatively small difference: 

perl -CS -e '$_ = join "", map { chr() } 0..255; s/\W//g; print $_,$/'

# (produces the same output as the first one-liner above)

perl -CS -e '$_ = join "", map { chr() } 0..256; s/\W//g; print $_,$/'

# (produces very different output)

[download]
(That assumes a utf8-capable terminal window. Redirect to files and use other display methods if necessary to really see what's happening.) The vastly different behavior based on a seemingly minor difference in the loop iterator relates to this quote from a message that Larry Wall posted a while back on the perl-unicode mail list:
Perl's always been about providing reasonable defaults, and will continue to do so. But changing what's reasonable is tricky, and sometimes you have to go through a period in which nothing can be considered reasonable.
Anyway, I'll second Joost's comment: it's not clear why you are asking this question -- maybe there's a better way to do what needs to be done, but you haven't told us what you're really trying to do.

(updated to fix spelling errors)

In reply to Re: Text delimiter by graff
in thread Text delimiter by Gavin

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