hyphen in regular expression

anand_perl has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: hyphen in regular expression by AnomalousMonk (Archbishop) on Sep 18, 2008 at 13:56 UTC
A hyphen in a character class `[a-d]` (and please use `<code> ... </code>` or `<c> ... </c>` tags around anything that looks like it might be code, e.g., anything in square brackets) specifies a range of characters; `[a-d]` is equivalent to `[abcd]`, so you need to use exactly what you used in your original post! Note that `\w` is very close to what you want, except it also includes the underscore character `'_'` and is affected by locale. See: perlre, perlretut, perlrequick.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: hyphen in regular expression by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 18, 2008 at 15:49 UTC
It's only affected by locale if `use locale;` is in effect.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: hyphen in regular expression by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 18, 2008 at 15:48 UTC
Since `[a-z]+` doesn't match hyphens, I'm guessing you are doing `# Matches if the string contains a sequence # of 1 or more lowercase letters $str =~ /[a-z]+/` [download] when you want to do `# Matches if the string consists entirely of # a sequence of 1 or more lowercase letters, # optionally followed by a newline $str =~ /^[a-z]+$/` [download] or `# Matches if the string consists entirely of # a sequence of 1 or more lowercase letters $str =~ /^[a-z]+\z/` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: hyphen in regular expression by toolic (Bishop) on Sep 18, 2008 at 13:51 UTC
Can any one help me on this... ... not very effectively until you provide some more context for your problem: Show a few lines of your actual input data. Show us what you expect your output to look like. Show the code that you have tried.	[reply]