Because that's not how the return value of matches is defined. In scalar context, a succesful match returns the number of times it matched. Without the /g, this will always be 1. With /g, this might be more, but that wouldn't help in your case. An unsuccesful match in scalar context returns the empty string, regardless of any flags.

That's the way how it works, and if you want to have different values depending what matched, you need to do a little more work.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Zipcode Regex Help by Abigail-II
in thread Zipcode Regex Help by tcf22

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