Question

According the Perl documentation on regexes:

By default, the "^" character is guaranteed to match only the beginning of the string … Embedded newlines will not be matched by "^" … You may, however, wish to treat a string as a multi-line buffer, such that the "^" will match after any newline within the string … you can do this by using the /m modifier on the pattern match operator.

The "after any newline" part means that it will only match at the beginning of the 2nd and subsequent lines. What if I want to match at the beginning of any line (1st, 2nd, etc.)?

EDIT: OK, it seems that the file has BOM information (3 chars) at the beginning and that’s what’s messing me up. Any way to get ^ to match anyway?

EDIT: So in the end it works (as long as there’s no BOM), but now it seems that the Perl documentation is wrong, since it says "after any newline"

Answer 1

You can use the /^(?:\xEF\xBB\xBF)?/mg regex to match at the beginning of the line anyway, if you want to preserve the BOM.