I have a curious piece of code, with an error in it, and while I have found the error, I can't explain the erroneous behavior. Could someone help me understand this?

I have a regex that I'm using to split apart a string, which I have simplified for this example. The regex contains capturing parentheses, and the error is that I also include capturing parentheses when I use the regex later.

#! /usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $r = qr{(.)}; while ('abc' =~ /($r)/g) { print "loop $1\n"; } foreach ('abc' =~ /($r)/g) { print "array $_\n"; }

The output is:

loop a loop b loop c array a array a array b array b array c array c

Removing either set of capturing parentheses fixes the problem, but I don't see how the while loop doesn't also get duplicate results?


In reply to Double Capturing Parentheses by pbeckingham

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.