I need to find the length of the first captured match from a regex. Normally, I might do this: 
my $x = 'abc12345';
my ($y) = $x =~ /(\d+)$/;
my $length = length($y);

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Being in a contrary mood, I wondered if I could do that in one statement, and tried this: 
my $x = 'abc12345';
my $length = length ($x =~ /(\d+)$/);
# returns 1, the length of the number in the number of elements

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I came up with this, but it wasn't satisfying: 
my $x = 'abc12345';
my $length = map { length } ($x =~ /(\d+)$/);

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(Yes, useles use of map might deserve its own warning.)

To generalize for cases where there might be more matches (a variable in the regex, for example), I generalized to this: 

my $x = 'abc12345';
my $length = map { length } ($x =~ /(\d+)$/)[0];

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But that led me to this: 
my $x = 'abc12345';
my $length = length (($x =~ /(\d+)$/)[0]);
# returns 5

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Is there a better way to do this, or have I hit the practical limit?

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

In reply to Length of first captured match by QM

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