Why not use 'tr' to get rid of junk in the input ?

This will kill everything except o,k,_,c,h,a,r,s in $my_input:

$my_input =~ tr/ok_chars//dc;

If you want to check and not 'clean' $my_input, you can run the above on a copy of $my_input and then compare it to the 'clean' version.

I suppose this can be used with U and C tr options for unicode support.


FuzzyCow