Another pre-5.10 approach is returning the list of capture group contents from the regex in list context and assigning directly to named variables:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $s = 'xxx foo , 987;-+--++-+%yyy';
 ;;
 my $sep = qr{ \s* [,;] \s* }xms;
 ;;
 my ($letters, $digits, $signs) =
   $s =~ m{ ([a-z]+) $sep (\d+) $sep ([-+]+) }xms;
 print qq{letters '$letters'  digits '$digits'  signs '$signs'};
"
letters 'foo'  digits '987'  signs '-+--++-+'
[download]

This module comes with perl and it is used to implement %+ and %-, not the named captures itself. It has no use with 5.8.

zwon
I didn't know that this module would not work with version 5.8 - thanks for the correction.

The (?{}) and (??{}) constructs are available for use in perl5.8, but you'd have to ask yourself if such ugliness is really worth it:

$ perl -MData::Dumper -e 'q(abc de f abcdef) =~ m/(?<x>\w{3}).*\k<x>/ 
+and print Dumper {%+};'
$ perl5.8.8 -MData::Dumper -e 'q(abc de f abcdef) =~ m/(?{$+{x} = pos}
+)(\w{3})(?{$+{x} = substr($_, $+{x}, -$+{x}+pos)}).*(??{$+{x}})/ and 
+print Dumper {%+};'
[download]

This can be made slightly less ugly by

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -le
"use Data::Dumper qw(Dumper);
 ;;
 print qq{perl version $]};
 ;;
 q(abc de f abcdef) =~ m/
   ( (\w{3}) (?{ $+{x} = $^N; }) .* (??{ $+{x}; }) )
   /x and print qq{\$1 '$1' \n}, Dumper \%+;
"
perl version 5.008009
$1 'abc de f abc'
$VAR1 = {
          'x' => 'abc'
        };
[download]

if it's really necessary to have named backreferences in the regex via a hash.

Otherwise, I'm not sure I see its advantage over something like

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -le
"print qq{perl version $]};
 ;;
 q(abc de f abcdef) =~ m/
   ( (\w{3}) .* \2 )
   /x and print qq{\$1 '$1'};
"
perl version 5.008009
$1 'abc de f abc'
[download]

or perhaps like

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -le
"print qq{perl version $]};
 ;;
 my $match = my ($whole, $first_part) = q(abc de f abcdef) =~ m/
   ( (\w{3}) .* \2 )
   /x
 ;;
 print qq{first part '$first_part'  whole '$whole'} if $match;
"
perl version 5.008009
first part 'abc'  whole 'abc de f abc'
[download]

---

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