note AnomalousMonk <blockquote><i> I thought <c>\w</C> would gobble up the whole table name first and <c>[^\s]</C> would stop the gobbling at the first space. </I></BLOCKQUOTE> <p> And that's just what happens. In, e.g., 'users', the <c> (\w*) </C> gobbles (and captures) 'user', and the <c> [^\s] </C> gobbles (and swallows) 's'. But all that's just what [moritz] just said. </P> <p> Another way of looking at the regex (or any pre-Perl 5.7 regex) is with [cpan://YAPE::Regex::Explain]. </P> <c> >perl -wMstrict -le "use YAPE::Regex::Explain; ;; my $rx = qr/^update\ (\w*)[^\s]/; print YAPE::Regex::Explain->new($rx)->explain; " The regular expression: (?-imsx:^update\ (\w*)[^\s]) matches as follows: NODE EXPLANATION ---------------------------------------------------------------------- (?-imsx: group, but do not capture (case-sensitive) (with ^ and $ matching normally) (with . not matching \n) (matching whitespace and # normally): ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ^ the beginning of the string ---------------------------------------------------------------------- update 'update' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- \ ' ' ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ( group and capture to \1: ---------------------------------------------------------------------- \w* word characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, _) (0 or more times (matching the most amount possible)) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ) end of \1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [^\s] any character except: whitespace (\n, \r, \t, \f, and " ") ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ) end of grouping ---------------------------------------------------------------------- </C> 969212 969212