perl regex replace non word characters except for ::

Question

I would like to have some perl regex to replace any non-word characters like so:

s/\W//g;

However, if there are two colons following eachother like ::, I would not like to replace those. Does anyone know how to accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

/\W/ is /[^\w]/, so /[^\w:]/ would delete every non-word char except colons.

You also want to delete lone colons (/(?<!:):(?!:)/), so the final solution is

s/[^\w:]|(?<!:):(?!:)//g;