Re: REGEX problem with anchors

[kcott]

in reply to REGEX problem with anchors

G'day live4tech,

I see you've resolved your problem. There can be rare instances when you want to preserve all the input, including terminal newlines. In these cases, you can use \Z (uppercase) instead of the more usual \z (lowercase).

$ perl -Mstrict -Mwarnings -E '
    while (<>) {
        say "z-match" if /\A\d+[a-z]+\z/;
        say "Z-match" if /\A\d+[a-z]+\Z/;
    }
'
123dog
Z-match

Details are in: perlre - Regular Expressions under Assertions.

[7stud]

But of course, there is no reason to ever use \Z (uppercase)--because you can just use \z (lowercase) and specify the \n in your regex:

/$my_regex \n \z/xms

...which makes it clearer what you are doing.

When you are having regex problems, the first thing you want to do is nail down what is in your string:

my $str = "123dog\n";
say "-->$str<--";

--output:--
-->123dog
<--

Or, to reveal the ord() of each character in the string:

printf "%vd", $my_str; 

--output:--
49.50.51.100.111.103.10    

#6 ascii chars in '123dog', but outputs 7 codes.
#Checking an ascii chart for the code 10:
#line feed.  Ah hah, I forgot to chomp()
#the string!