This is one of the those cases where as a new perl programmer I jump into perlvar to figure out what these variables are.

If I understand the documentation correctly, @+ would be calculated as follows:

1: Entire regex matched the'gh' in 'abcdefgh'. End of match is 8. (This corresponds to $&).

2: First backreference matches 'g'. End of match is at position 7. ($1)

3: 2nd backreference matches 'h'. End of match is at position 8. ($2) Am I on track? Thanks