Thanks for this, it lead to the answer!

The one-liner worked for me as well and so I went back to my code (which I should have posted) and realized I forgot to chomp the input strings (the user was prompted to enter input strings and a regex). I chomped the regex, not the input strings. A novice mistake, I apologize!

In case you are using Eclipse withe epic plugin as IDE for development you can check your regular expression with the RegExp View. Also, in case you got leading whitespaces or a linebrake at the end of your string - you can easily see in debug mode in the variables view. For me always a great help.

^_^

Cheers!

Tobias

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
[download]

Details are in: perlre - Regular Expressions under Assertions.

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
[download]

...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
<--
[download]

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!
[download]