understand the need of “\v” in substitution

Question

I have a following line:

   <a href="/episodes/show-invisibles/"> Show invisibles: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/show-invisibles/

..and I have a :s/\v^[^\>]+\>\s//g substitution command which changes this line to:

Show invisibles: http://vimcasts.org/episodes/show-invisibles/

As I understand the regular expression of this substitution, then ^[^\>]+\>\s part will match one or more whatever character(except >) from the beginning of the line until > and whitespace character appear. However, why is the \v needed? According to vim manual:

Use of "\v" means that in the pattern after it all ASCII characters except
'0'-'9', 'a'-'z', 'A'-'Z' and '_' have a special meaning.  "very magic"

However, why is this needed in this particular case?

Answer 1

In this particular case, using \v doesn't make much difference

s/^[^>]\+>\s//g

is perhaps cleaner than using the very magic modifier

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Consider swapping two words:

s/\(\w\+\) \(\w\+\)/\2 \1/

With \v it is much cleaner and readable

s/\v(\w+) (\w+)/\2 \1/

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So, it might be a habit to always use \v and it is closer to regular expression syntax used in perl, sed -r, awk etc