Your regex does match the empty string, which it should not from your descriptions. So remove the |^$ part.

You can also write your regex as /\A(?>\s*)\D/, where (?>\s*) means grab all whitespaces and don't give them up for backtracking.

I don't know if you consider that more simple or elegant, though.

Perl 6 - links to (nearly) everything that is Perl 6.

In reply to Re: Ideas to improve this regexp? by moritz
in thread Ideas to improve this regexp? by rovf

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