OptiPerl is a commercial 'IDE' - perhaps you should contact the support desk of the vendor. If you want vi-like behaviour and you want it on windows perhaps you should consider something that actually does that like 'gvim' or 'viper' for emacs.

/J\

/.*/ should do, as a dot matches anything that's not a newline. However, I'm trying to get rid of the habit, and try to learn myself to use /[^\n]*/ instead. This makes it easier to slap /s on your regex if you want dot to really match everything. And in Perl6, a dot will match everything anyway. If only Perl5 would recognize \N.

Thanks a lot!

The /[^\n]*/ worked!
I always thought that the backslash would lose its metacharacter behaviour in the brackets, so I didn't get the idea.

The /.*/ did not work since I don't have a /s switch.

If you read your code in line by line, which is the normal way in perl, the special variable $_ matches the current line automatically, so you don't need a regex to match it.

Or, I guess,

^.*$

will also match an entire line if you have to use a regex. Or

blah.*$

will match everything from the first blah out to the end of the line.

Or maybe you could rephrase the question if that isn't quite what you wanted.

use warnings;
use strict;
while (<DATA>) {
  print '$_: ' . "$_";
  /^.*$/;
  print '/^.*$/: ' . "$&\n"; # print the match
  /blah.*$/;
  print '/blah.*$/: ' . "$&\n";
  print "\n";
}

#outputs: 
#$_: blah
#/^.*$/: blah
#/blah.*$/: blah
#
#$_: foo blah
#/^.*$/: foo blah
#/blah.*$/: blah
#
#$_: foo bar blah blah blah
#/^.*$/: foo bar blah blah blah
#/blah.*$/: blah blah blah
#
#$_: 
#/^.*$/: 
#/blah.*$/: 


__DATA__
blah
foo blah
foo bar blah blah blah
[download]

Thanks for your fast answer. My Problem is not using the RegExp IN the code but ON the code. (Editing / Generating code in the editor). I know the $ meta-character. But somehow i cound not make it work correctly.

Here is an example, I had something like:
 my $foobar = substr($line,20,30);  # this is :;- a comment
which I changed to

#*****
# this is :;- a comment
#*****
sub foobar($){
  return substr($_[0],20,30);
}
[download]

for a couple of hundreds of variables.
for matching the comment at the end of the line, I did something like:
 (#[a-zA-Z0-9 -_;:()]+) I think there must be a more elegant way to do this.

This help?

use warnings;
use strict;
while (<DATA>) {

  #everything before the #
  /^[^#]*/;
  print 'everything before the #: ' . "$&\n";
  
  #everything from the # to the end of the line
  /#.*/;
  print '/#.*/: ' . "$&\n";
  print "\n";
}

#outputs: 
#everything before the #: blah 
#/#.*/: #this is a comment
#
#everything before the #: foo blah 
#/#.*/: #this is a comment
#
#everything before the #: foo bar blah blah blah 
#/#.*/: #this is a comment
#
#everything before the #: 
#
#/#.*/: 
#
__DATA__
blah #this is a comment
foo blah #this is a comment
foo bar blah blah blah #this is a comment
[download]

ditto re Fookes' NoteTab (and even the "pro" vers is only USD 20.)