http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=1040537


in reply to Re^2: grep for ending with double quotes
in thread grep for ending with double quotes

Remember how in my first reply, removing the ^ eliminated the requirement that the match occur at the beginning of the string? Guess what. Putting it back will reinstate that requirement:

my @arr = grep /^"/, @arr_s;

One metacharacter at a time, one question at a time is a really inefficient way to learn about regular expressions. Please have a look at perlretut, perlrequick, and perlre. The first two of those documents will take a half hour to 45 minutes to get through, and then you'll be ready to save the day with regular expressions. ;)

Update: I can see I missed the part of your question that says words shouldn't end with ":

/^"[^"]$/

That would accept anything that starts with a ", but contains no " characters after that. Or...

/^"\p{Alpha}+$/

In the old days "\w" was marginally useful, but in a Unicode world, \p{Alpha} is probably more accurate. By the way, are you worried about words like "ain't" and "they're"?


Dave