I'm having a hard time understand this behavior (the title is probably not accurate). The Person class below is copied exactly from the CookBook, if I pass a literal parameter, all is fine, but if I pass $1 from a regex, then it got lost. What's going on? 
use strict;
use Person;

my $person1 = Person->new;
$person1->name("goodname"); # pass a string literal
print "Good name: ", $person1->name(),"\n"; # the name is printed.


my $person2 = Person->new;
my $s = "badname";
if($s =~ /(.+)/){ #just to match anything
  $person2->name($1); # now pass $1, which is "badname"
}
print "Bad name:",$person2->name(),"\n"; # the name is lost!
__END__
Good name: goodname
Bad name:

[download]
Here's the person class from the Cookbook: 
package Person;
use strict;
use Carp;
use vars qw($AUTOLOAD %ok_field);

# Authorize four attribute fields
for my $attr ( qw(name age peers parent) ) { $ok_field{$attr}++; } 

sub AUTOLOAD {
    my $self = shift;
    my $attr = $AUTOLOAD;
    $attr =~ s/.*:://;
    return unless $attr =~ /[^A-Z]/;  # skip DESTROY and all-cap metho
+ds
    croak "invalid attribute method: ->$attr()" unless $ok_field{$attr
+};
    $self->{uc $attr} = shift if @_;
    return $self->{uc $attr};
}

sub new {
    my $proto  = shift;
    my $class  = ref($proto) || $proto;
    my $parent = ref($proto) && $proto;
    my $self = {};
    bless($self, $class);
    $self->parent($parent);
    return $self;
} 

1;

[download]

In reply to Strange behavior: passing $1 to AUTOLOAD by johnnywang

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.