Regex whitespace and non-word puzzler

I want to be able prefix all non-words EXCEPT SPACES with a
backslash.

I would like to make this 3 line regex substitution into a
single 
line - avoiding the temporary whitespace substitution.

Any help will be appreciated

NJH

#######
#! perl 
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $text = 'A ver~sion, of 5 6  NJH's SD card 'which'
enables the 
PCB itself to be plug'ged (directly) into a
#,standard SD card 
input connector';

$text =~ s/(s+)/zxz/g;
$text =~ s/(W+)/\$1/g;
$text =~ s/(zxz)/ /g;

print $text;
#######

Results with this:

A ver~sion, of 5 6 NJH's SD card 'which' enables the
PCB itself 
to be plug'ged (directly) into a #,standard SD card
input 
connector




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>>>>> "hooyar66" == hooyar66 
<pcbcadhotpop.com> writes:

hooyar66> I want to be able prefix all non-words EXCEPT
SPACES with a backslash.

you mean non-word-characters?

so the set of W without space?

That'd be [^w ], so s/([^w ])/\$1/g

Pretty simple, once you understand set arithmetic. 


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