If I feed either aaa"bbb" or "aaa"bbb to your initial match, $1 is respectively aaa or "aaa" and $2 is empty. Can you give an example of what your regexp does?
chas
(Update: Now copying and pasting your first regexp again it appears that in the cases I mentioned $1 is "bbb" or bbb and $2 is empty, but $` is aaa or "aaa". Did your first regexp change? What is really confusing me is that if I set @results=m/([^"']+|(?:"(?:[^"]|\\")*"))/g for the cases I mentioned, I do get aaa and "bbb" (or "aaa" and bbb.) I don't see why the match operator doesn't seem to return $1 and $2. Perhaps I should give up for the day...)
(Update2: To be explicit about what I mean - I ran the script: 
$_=<>;
chomp;
@results=m/([^"']+|(?:"(?:[^"]|\\")*"))/g;
print "$results[0],  $results[1]\n";
print "$1, $2\n";
print "$`, $1, $2\n";

[download]
and entered aaa"bbb". The result was: 
aaa,  "bbb"
"bbb",
aaa, "bbb",

[download]
Seems bizarre to me, but perhaps I'm missing something obvious.

In reply to Re: Regex weirdness? by chas
in thread Regex weirdness? by Pic

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.