Sorry couldn't think of a short snappy title to this problem.

Is there a way of using the grouping re capability in Perl without (implicity) increasing the variable count. That is I want to match and replace some stuff without ending up referring to $largenumber.

For example, given the substitution

s/(some|stuff)(more|stuff).*?(what I really want here)/$3/;

[download]

I would like to use $1 rather than $3 cause the first two groupings are really there just to anchor the pattern. I don't need them in the substitution.

A more extreme case is

$htmltag="(<[^>]+>)";
s/<td>$htmltag{99}(.*?)<\/td>/$100/;

[download]

I really am just interested in the (.*?) grouping, the other groupings are just there to make the repetition count work out right. Am I stuck with $100 or is there a way to group expressions without using parentheses?

Thanks,

M

Code tags added by GrandFather

In reply to Grouping regular expressions by Anonymous Monk

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