What the JavaFan means is that  \N (without curly braces) in Perl 5.12+ is an experimental backslash sequence that will match any character but a newline. The negated character class  [^\n] will do the same for pre-5.12 Perl (but I haven't tested JavaFan's actual regex). (See Backslashed sequences (5.12.0), fourth paragraph in the Whitespace subsection, for discussion.)