Hmm I see what you mean, extending the code with more matches soon gets really unwieldy. You need some kind of looping construct.

Now I wish I could say you could handle this easily with a single pattern, but unfortunately, a repetition modifier around captures doesn't produce the desired results: 

$_ = 'de ad be ef #junk';
/^(\w\w)(?: (\w\w))*/;

[download]
will only retain two captures: in the end, $1 will be 'de', the first capture, and $2 will be 'ef', the last one — the rest will simple have been forgotten about.

There's no way around it, this requires a two step approach: Step 1) extract the whole of all the captures, Step 2), split it into parts.

  1. The first approach is to use split for step 2: 
    $_ = 'de ad be ef #junk';
/^(\w\w(?: \w\w)*)/;
my @capture = split ' ', $1;

    [download]
  2. Use //g, either in a loop, or in list context.
    1. //g in list context: 
      $_ = 'de ad be ef #junk';
my @capture = /\G(?:^|\ )(\w\w)/g;

      [download]
    2. A loop with //g in scalar context: 
      $_ = 'de ad be ef #junk';
my @capture;
while(/\G(?:^|\ )(\w\w)/g) {
    push @capture, $1;
}

      [download]

Be extremely careful with the latter that you don't accidently cause an endless loop. I did, with 

/(?:^|\G\ )(\w\w)/g

[download]
I'm still not sure why.

In reply to Re^4: pattern matching by bart
in thread pattern matching by vineet2004

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