Actually, he wants to be using =, not =~. =~ says to use the variable on the left as the thing to perform the regex on. If there is no source, $_ =~ is automatically put in at the left of the regex. As he wants to assign the results of the regex, performed on $_, to the lvalues, = is correct.

This is actually a very common thing to do when parsing something that split doesn't work nicely on. Again, that's his example data. So, = and a regex are exactly the right calls here. (I spent 3 hours Friday working with similar data that was almost fixed-delimited, but wasn't, so I had to move away from unpack to a regex and it worked perfectly. Yes, they're complicated, but they work.)

(I didn't realize this at the time, but this is my 500th node!)

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