Consider the example of having as input a list of numbers, some of which are not known exactly but only known to be inside a given range (that is encoded in a string value).

The following code snippet adds up the given numbers, returning an upper and lower bound for the result:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict; use warnings;

my @ranges = ('15', '28-31', '3-4', '40', '17-19');
my ($total_min, $total_max);

foreach my $range (@ranges) {
  my ($min) = $range =~ /^(\d+)/;
  my ($max) = $range =~ /(\d+)$/;
  $total_min += $min;
  $total_max += $max;
}

print "total is between $total_min and $total_max\n";

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It works fine, but regarding the regex part, the need to

always seriously bothers me in cases like this.

I would much prefer to be able to write the whole body of the of loop in the above example in the form:

  $total_min += SELF_CONTAINED_FUNCTIONAL_STATEMENT;
  $total_max += SELF_CONTAINED_FUNCTIONAL_STATEMENT;

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Is there an alternative syntax for string extraction using regexes that would allow this?

It's not about performance or such. It's about my brain receiving a nice dose of dopamin whenever I write a line of concise, functional, self-contained code - and the opposite when I can't.

----
PS: Even better would be the following, but unfortunately it seems that Perl's += operator does not work that way:

  ($total_min, $total_max) += STATEMENT_RETURNING_A_LIST_OF_TWO_NUMS;

[download]

In reply to Is there a more functional regex syntax? by smls

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