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From: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Bug with regular expressions? (ver 3 patch 44)
Message-ID: <11671@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV>
Date: 4 Mar 91 21:16:50 GMT
References: <16981@venera.isi.edu>
Reply-To: lwall@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV (Larry Wall)
Organization: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA
Lines: 16

In article <16981@venera.isi.edu> sondeen@venera.isi.edu (Jeff Sondeen) writes:
: 
: The following works without the caret (^) specifying beginning of line; with
: the caret, it doesn't match the input (which starts in column 1):
: 
: program:	perl -ne 'if (/^\w:/) { print; }'
: on input:	nope:
: gives result:	<nothing>
: expected result: nope:
: hypothesis:	the caret(^) specifying beginning of line is messing up the
: 		regular expression matching

Alternate hypothesis:
	\w matches a word character, not a word.  Test by using \w+ instead.

Larry