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in reply to Re: Help me write a good reg-exp for this text
in thread Help me write a good reg-exp for this text

Hi - Thanks for the help. I don't understand the \A in s/\A\s*// however. Can you explain it to me?

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Re: Care to explain s/\A\s*//?
by halley (Prior) on Sep 05, 2003 at 17:22 UTC
    $ perldoc perlre
    The \A anchors the search at the beginning of the string. A ^ anchors a search at the beginning of the LINE in a string. Documentation is a wonderful thing.

    --
    [ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

      I don't understand why you want to act in such an obscure manner, because without the /m modifier, as here, there is no difference between /^\s*/ and /\A\s*/. So you might just as well use the far more familiar form, with the caret.

      The difference between /\Z/, /\z/ and /$/ is far more significant.

      Well, I do agree with you on the RTFM part... it's all in there. Looking there should become a more natural response, than asking here.

      I'd prefer

      s/^\s+//;
      anyway, as this wouldn't do an empty substitution if the string doesn't start with whitespace.