Hello jockel,

A standard idiom (see Re: Containing 'use lib' statements in modules to their own namespace) for removing (“breaking”) the alias is to assign the aliased variable to a lexical variable inside the loop:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $arrayref = ['A','_B','C'];

for my $str (@$arrayref)
{
    print "BEFORE: str = $str\n";
}

for (@$arrayref)
{
    my $str = $_;
       $str =~ s/^_//;
    print "INNER:  str = $str\n";
}

for my $str (@$arrayref)
{
    print "AFTER:  str = $str\n";
}
[download]

Output:

13:30 >perl 1738_SoPW.pl
BEFORE: str = A
BEFORE: str = _B
BEFORE: str = C
INNER:  str = A
INNER:  str = B
INNER:  str = C
AFTER:  str = A
AFTER:  str = _B
AFTER:  str = C

13:30 >
[download]

BTW, an underscore character has no special meaning in a regex, so it doesn’t need to be escaped. Also, in the absence of an /m modifier, ^ can only ever match once, at the beginning of the string, so the /g modifier is redundant.

Hope that helps,