Note that if you ever even mention $`, $&, or $', anywhere, then all regular expressions anywhere in that run of Perl will be not-insignificantly slower. So their use is strongly discouraged in code that might be reused or where performance is important. This is because using those anywhere forces each regex to make copies of those strings every time, even though most of those copies will never be used (if Perl ever needs them then Perl can't predict when it might need them and so must always make the copies).

But the latest version of Perl adds an alternate way to get this type of information, @- and @+. Here is a sample of how to use them: 

( my $str= "left center right" ) =~ /center/;
print "\nLeft:  <", substr( $str, 0, $-[0] ),
      ">\nMatch: <", substr( $str, $-[$#-], $+[$#-] - $-[$#-] ),
      ">\nRight: <", substr( $str, $+[$#+] ), ">\n";
__END__
This prints:
Left:  <left >
Match: <center>
Right: < right>

[download]

At the time of this writing, perlvar isn't recent enough to mention @- and @+. But if you have a version of Perl recent enough to have @- and @+, (Perl 5.6.0 or later) then your perlvar.pod will also include documentation on them.

If you can't find perlvar.pod then enter the command perldoc perlvar or cd to your perl lib directory and there should be a pod directory that contains that file. These pod files contain some simple "mark-up" codes but are designed to be easy for humans to read. (You can read perlpod.pod for more information on the mark-up language.)

        - tye

In reply to Re: How do I get what is to the left of my match? by tye
in thread How do I get what is to the left of my match? by NotProud

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