The problem is the ^ "beginning-of-string" anchor at the beginning of your regex, and the $ "end-of-string" anchor at the end. It ends up meaning "if the entire string consists of invalid characters, delete the entire string". What I think you mean is "if there are any invalid characters in the string, replace them with nothing", which you get by simply removing the anchors: 
$test1 =~ s/[^A-Za-z\-\ ]+//g;

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By the way, if you're dealing with untrusted input and trying to avoid doing unsafe things with it, you should read about "taint mode" in perlsec.


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In reply to Re: Inverse regexes for input validation by sgifford
in thread Inverse regexes for input validation by Anonymous Monk

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