Yes, somehow it does seem unavoidable that in the second case, the regex match gets coerced to return a scalar. I guess the only way to get the desired behavior on one line would be: 
$a = ( "abc" =~ /a(b)c/ ) ? $1 : 'd';

[download]
which I would tend to prefer anyway, even if your second case worked the way you wanted it to.

In reply to Re: Regexp context with || by graff
in thread Regexp context with || by bsb

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