I apologize if the answer to this is obvious or to be found readily, however it would not seem to be. I searched QandASection: regular expressions, perlfunc, and Super Search; though it's limiting to 4+ characters made searching for the obvious impossible.

Brother smgfc asked in the chatterbox for help considering an infinite loop involving 

# substr no good, this is a simplified regexp
while( ($b, $c) = $a =~ /(.)(.)/g ){
  #do stuff
}

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I surmised that we needed to track pos for ourselves. Fine. Printing it from within the loop works just fine. However, attempting to set a scalar to the value returned by pos, doesn't. Trying to be clever, I also tried to side-step the issue with 
$p = pos($a) ? 1 : 0;

[download]
which proceeded to also do a whole lot of nothing. So I inquire, what and why is this bizarre behavior?

--
perl -pe "s/\b;([st])/'\1/mg"

In reply to puzzled by pos by belg4mit

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