In your example, $#- will always be 1, because the conditional is fulfilled after the first match. Also, $#- can't really be useful in this matter at all, because it returns the index of the last match in @- ,which in turn gives you the match offset into the string, not the matched content.

Update: This is completely wrong and nobull is correct, my apologies (hangs head in shame). To make up for it, here's a practical example of finding your matched word with nobull's method (I still like my method below better, but YMMV):

my @words = qw(foo bar baz);

my $regex = join(")|(",grep { quotemeta($_) } @words);

if ($input =~ m/($regex)/ ){
    my $index = $#- -1;
    print "matched word $words[$index]\n";
}

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There are ten types of people: those that understand binary and those that don't.

In reply to Re^2: Finding out which of a list of patterns matched by tirwhan
in thread Finding out which of a list of patterns matched by lemnisca

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