I wrote a code that looks like this: 

my $text = <<TEXT;

Title: The Moor's Last Sigh, Author: Salman Rushdie

Title: The God of Small Things, Author: Arundhati Roy

TEXT

my @answers;
my $re = qr/Title: (.*?), Author: (\w+) (\w+)$/; # 3 groups here
while ($text =~ /$re/mgc) {
   my %ans;
   push @answers, [ $1, $2, $3 ]; # that's the main point!
}

use Data::Dump qw(dump);
print dump(\@answers);

[download]

And then I got the answer I want in @answers, namely: 

(
  ["The Moor's Last Sigh", "Salman", "Rushdie"],
  ["The God of Small Things", "Arundhati", "Roy"],
)

[download]

Now imagine I want to run the same code against other inputs and with other regexes driving the extraction. These regexes can have an arbitrary number of capturing groups. I can't get all groups by using $text = /$re/mgc in list context, because it will make a loop over the text gathering $1, $2, ... of each match into a list (that is, $1, $2, ..., $1, $2, ..., ...). The code above is actually a simplification and it should work on a context more like this: 

if ($text =~ /$re1/mgc) { ...
if ($text =~ /$re2/mgc) { ...
if ($text =~ /$re1/mgc) { ...
if ($text =~ /$re2/mgc) { ...

[download]

So the /g behavior in list context is inappropriate. To get ($1, $2, ...) in a generic form, the only way I envisaged was to use @- and @+ and to employ a piece of code like this: 

# return ($1, $2, ...) matched against $s
sub _groups {
    my $s = shift;
    my @groups;
    foreach my $i (1..$#-) {
        push @groups, substr($s, $-[$i], $+[$i] - $-[$i]);
    }
    return @groups
}

[download]

and then: 

   push @answers, [ _groups($text) ]; # [ ($1, $2, ...) ]

[download]

My question is: Is there actually a better way to do this?

In reply to How to get ($1, $2, ...)? by ferreira

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.