Given this string: my $str = "Romp romp ROMP"; We can match just the first or last by using the usual pinning features, '^' or '$':
say $str ~~ m:i:g/^romp/; ## (｢Romp｣) say $str ~~ m:i:g/romp$/; ## (｢ROMP｣) Moritz Lenz (Section 3.8 of 'Parsing', p32) makes the point you can use 'after' to do something like '^' pinning: say $str ~~ m:i:g/ <!after .> romp /; ## (｢Romp｣) That makes sense: the BOL is "not after any character" So: I wondered if there was a way to use 'before' to do something like '$' pinning: say $str ~~ m:i:g/ romp <!before .> /; ## (｢Romp｣ ｢romp｣) That was unexpected: it filters out the one I was trying to match for, though the logic seemed reasonable: the EOL is "not before any character". What if we flip this and do a positive before match? say $str ~~ m:i:g/ romp <?before .> /; ## (｢Romp｣ ｢romp｣) That does exactly the same thing, but here the logic makes sense to me: the first two are "before some character", but the last one isn't.
