Pattern Modifiers explanation

Flame has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This has been bugging me since I started learning perl, about a year ago now. I've read in Programming Perl (Third Edition) that m//g is a global match. It's my understanding that this means it keeps matching until it no longer can, and then returns a list of what it matched (or what was captured).

The question is, what does m//cg do? According to the book, it tells it to continue matching, but I'm at a loss to understand what it means by that since there shouldn't be anything more to the pattern... should there? Could someone come up with a few working examples of m//cg and m//g in action that could demonstrate the difference?

Thank you.

"Weird things happen, get used to it."

Flame ~ Lead Programmer: GMS

Comment on Pattern Modifiers explanation

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Re: Pattern Modifiers explanation by mitd (Curate) on Jul 26, 2002 at 05:07 UTC
Andrew Johnson, the author of 'Elements of Programming with Perl, has an very complete answer to your question in this article. mitd-Made in the Dark 'Interactive! Paper tape is interactive! If you don't believe me I can show you my paper cut scars!'	[reply]
Re: Re: Pattern Modifiers explanation by danger (Priest) on Jul 26, 2002 at 06:13 UTC
Egads, those pages never render well for me --- you can see plain text versions of all my old itworld articles here and this particular one is the first in this page.	[reply]
Re: Re: Pattern Modifiers explanation by Flame (Deacon) on Jul 27, 2002 at 05:01 UTC
Thanks, now I get it. Not sure if I'll ever need it, but it's good to know it's there. My code doesn't have bugs, it just develops random features. Flame ~ Lead Programmer: GMS	[reply]