Re^2: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces

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in reply to Re: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces
in thread regex to remove all non a-z and spaces

I'm not good with regexes to any degree but doesn't ^ just mean to match at the beginning of the string? How is this removing everything but a-z and numbers?

Comment on Re^2: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces

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Re^3: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces by mrborisguy (Hermit) on May 16, 2005 at 02:53 UTC
usually, ^ does mean at the beginning, but the [ and ] make a character class, and a ^ at the beginning of a character class means "not any of these". Update: Oddly enough, it doesn't explicitly say that in perlre. however, it does say You can negate the [::] character classes by prefixing the class name with a '^'. This is a Perl extension.	[reply]
Re^4: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces by coldfingertips (Pilgrim) on May 16, 2005 at 02:57 UTC
So what it's really saying is "s/// anything that is not within our class"? So `s/[^0-9\.-]//g;` would be an example on how to remove any non number (except - and .)?	[reply] [d/l]
Re^5: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces by mrborisguy (Hermit) on May 16, 2005 at 03:01 UTC
yep! you got it.	[reply]
Re^6: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces by coldfingertips (Pilgrim) on May 16, 2005 at 03:04 UTC
Re^4: regex to remove all non a-z and spaces by hv (Prior) on May 16, 2005 at 11:02 UTC
Oops, that's a strange omission in the docs (though negating character classes is briefly mentioned in perlrequick and perlretut. Just for the record, it is specifically the negation of POSIX character classes that is a perl extension - `/[^a-z]/` is straight from Henry Spencer's original code. Hugo	[reply] [d/l]

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