***RESOLVED: Thank you everybody for your replies/help. Also, thanks for dealing with the stupid example :P The point was understanding how the anchors and '*' were interacting, and everybody's responses helped clarify. Much obliged.*** Good Afternoon, I'm finding myself in a semantics battle against myself, and I'm losing. I'm trully hoping somebody can smack some sense into me here. I speak the regex /^[a]*$/ as, "A line beginning and ending with zero or more characters in the set {a}". With that, I understand how an empty string will match e.g. 
$foo = "";
if ($foo =~ /^[a]*$/) {
    print "Match\n";
}

[download]
...prints "Match". So, if this regex does translate to, "A line beginning and ending with zero or more letters in the set/class {a}"...then why doesn't "Match" get printed if I set 
$foo = "1";

[download]
And to finalize my question (which is all about not TRULY understanding how anchors are changing the semantics), why will 
$foo = "1";
if ($foo =~ /^[a]*/) {
    print "Match\n";
}

[download]
.....print "Match". What are these anchors doing in combination with the '*'? Thanks in advance for any assistance. Chris

In reply to Regex Semantics by cbro

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.