Hello monks,

I got a small problem concerning references in perls regex flavor.
For example, I got a string like this

$lala = "Hello you therre."

And I want to match all double characters (a-z), i.e. ll and rr in the given string and contract them to one char. (Please do not take this seriously, its just an example.)

So I went like this:

$lala =~ s/([a-z])$1/$1/g

It does not work. So I played around:

$lala =~ s/([a-z])\1/$1/g

This works. But what I kept in mind was this: Warning on \1 vs $1

So I don't know why in the first version the $1 in the matching part (not the substitute part) does not work but with \1 in the second version? I thought \1 is obsolete and just a relic of a sed styled referencing.

This is nothing big, but ... did I miss something?

Thanks in advance,

ocs.

tennis players have fuzzy balls.


In reply to perl regex referencing by ocs

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.