Hello Monks of Great Perl Wisdom,

I came across a strange regex construct recently and it troubled me deeply. So I bethought myself to ask on perlmonks if this has the blessings of the Wall and the Pumpkings or if this is simply hogwash :-). 

 if ($varstring =~ /arbITRary CharS ($|--$)/) {
# do whatever
}

[download]
Now this use of <SAMP>($|--$)</SAMP> is what is bothering me. It seems to me that "positional anchors" if that is what we could call the use "$" this way, should only be able to be used as such, not as metachars in the other sense. I tried to test this out in a simple one-liner case but I got strange inconclusive results, so now I'm asking.

Thanks,
  Soren

In reply to Weird? regex Question by Intrepid

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