Andresen,Jason R. writes:

The RE I used was precisely what I wanted: x.y (an `x' followed by exactly one character followed by a `y').

When I run the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl $a = "xayxbyxcyxdy"; @s = $a =~ /x.y/; print "\@s is @s\n";

I get:

@s is 1

So, I seem to be getting the truth value rather than the first match in the string. If, however, I wrap the entire RE in a parentheses (make it a subexpression) like so:

#!/usr/bin/perl $a = "xayxbyxcyxdy"; @s = $a =~ /(x.y)/; print "\@s is @s\n";

I get the results I wanted to begin with:

@s is xay

(I discovered this shortly after I sent the first message about this).

What confuses me is that if I specify the global option, I do not need to use a subexpression. For example, if I run the following code:

#!/usr/bin/perl $a = "xayxbyxcyxdy"; @s = $a =~ /x.y/g; print "\@s is @s\n";

I get:

@s is xay xby xcy xdy

So, this leaves me with a couple of questions, the main one being: Why the different treatment for single matches and global matches?

and a less important one: Why is there no way to have the first match assigned to a scalar, since we can be sure that there will be at most one match returned?

If anyone can explain this, and/or answer the questions posed above, I'd appreciate it.

-Chris

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