I am upset. First off, I know that a new positional variable is created each time a new set of parentheses is encountered in a regexp. Such that: 
my $C='((w)hite|(b)lack)';
open F, $file;

my ($c) = grep /$C\s+"princepawn"/i, <F>;

[download]
yields 
[
          'Black',
          undef,
          'B'
        ];
### or
[
          'Black',
          'W',
          undef        ];

[download]
but you would think that alternation would realize that only one of the alternatives would bind right? But oh well.

The other thing is it is too hard to get the first character from a string in Perl. If I can push and pop arrays, why can't i push and pop strings?

In reply to string processing and regexp alternation... by princepawn

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