Hello Monks, I'll try to be brief. I'm a newbie trying to learn Perl with that cryptic tome, the Camel. I'm on "Fancy Patterns" and they are dealing with code within a regular expression. Can some enlightened Monk please, please explain this damn example??? Here it is: 

$_ = "lothlorien";

m/ (?{ $i = 0 })
   (.  (?{ local $i = $i + 1; })  )*  
   lori
   (?{ $result = $i })
/xi;

[download]

Now i = 4.

This example purportedly makes use of dynamic scoping. Unfortunately, the Camel has done a pretty crappy job explaining, or even using in examples, things like "local". The example right before this one was the exact same thing, but just used "$i++" instead of local, and didn't need the $result variable at the end. In that one, $i=10. A fellow monk explained to me that the .* greedily gobbles up the whole string, 10 characters, so $i gets incremented to 10 and the .* never matches again. (it only gives up some characters due to back-tracking). But in this one $i is 4!

I have no idea why, and my study has come to a grinding halt. Please help! Thanks :)

In reply to reg-ex frustration by stratkid

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