in reply to Re^5: How do I reverse the order of the first and last word of a string?
in thread How do I reverse the order of the first and last word of a string?

Thats all very clear now, thnx

I have an other (a little bit off topic) question, its about
map {s/[^a-z ]//gi} @words;

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I do understand the map part, but I don't really understand what it is supposed to remove ?

I've tested it a little bit more in detail like
my $x = " aabbaaccaa  " ;
$x =~ s/[^a-z ]//g ;

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What exactly is the role of the ^, because I think thats the point where I loose it!!

Thnx
LuCa

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Re: How do I reverse the order of the first and last word of a string?
by jonadab (Parson) on Mar 11, 2007 at 16:44 UTC
    What exactly is the role of the ^

    In a character class (the square brackets thing), if you put ^ (called a "caret") first before any characters, it negates the whole class, so it means "any character _except_ one of these". (You can include a caret in a character class and have it just be a literal ^ character, if it's not the first thing; it only has this special negate-the-class meaning if it's first.)

    This is all only in a character class, though. In other regular-expression contexts, the caret is a zero-width positive assertion that matches only at the beginning. (Whether it matches at the beginning of the line or the beginning of the string depends on the options you're using.)

    So this regular expression matches any string that starts with a vowel:

    /^[aeiou]/i

    But this one matches any string that starts with something *other* than a vowel:

    /^[^aeiou]/i

    (Technically, I should say "unaccented Latin-alphabet vowel" in both of those statements, but if you assume strings are composed of printed ASCII characters then what I said is good enough. The extra verbiage would only be necessary to accommodate other character sets, notably Unicode. And anyway, the meaning of the word "vowel" is really not the main point here.)

    -- 
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      I already thought something strange was going on with the caret. Thanks!

      LuCa
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