regex to match word boundary beginning with special characters

Question

I have regex that matches words fine except if they contain a special character such as ~Query which is the name of a member of a C++ class. Need to use word boundary as sh

Answer 1

Assuming you don't need to check the contents of $match (i.e. it always contains a valid identifier) you can write this

$key =~ /(?

which simply checks that the string in $match isn't preceded or followed by alphanumerics, underscores or tildes