Greetings Monks,

I have a string like 6 1/2 which, according to emacs, has a _ between the 6 and the 1. However, emacs chooses to highlight this mysterious underscore in red, and when I replace it by typing _, I see a normal _ in black. Also, when I paste that string into non-emacs things, as you can see, there is no underscore, but there is whitespace.

Believe it or not, all I want to do is 
$str="6 1/2";  # actually it comes from a file of tokenized strings
$str=~s/_/-/;

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I want to replace that mystery character between the 6 and the 1 with a -. That's it. But figuring out what that character is is driving me crazy.

I'd happily post this on like UTF8Monks if there was one. :)

Thanks, D

In reply to Weird underscore/whitespace failing regex by d-napizzle

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