If there is no match the content of the capture variables is bogus
That's not strictly accurate. The capture variables reflect the last successful match, where that match is dynamically scoped. The 5.8.x behaviour was a bug, fixed in 5.10.0 by commit c74340f9cdee.

Dave.

In reply to Re^2: curious regex result for perl 5.8.8 by dave_the_m
in thread curious regex result for perl 5.8.8 by erodrig

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