Interesting, I wasn't aware of anchors at all. That definitely makes it easier.

I ended up coming up with this, which seems to work fine and avoids previously tagged cases, but the anchored version is better.

$text =~ s/(\bS\.(?=\s))/\<\1=initial\>/g;

In reply to Re^2: Regex is eating up whitespace by gatito
in thread Regex is eating up whitespace by gatito

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