It's not especially clear and it's an easy mistake to make. I've been using Perl for years and consider myself quite experienced with it, but this exact issue got me a couple of months ago. I had to read the text rendering of a bunch of records, which might or might not contain all fields from the database.

while (<TEXT>) { ($f1) = /yada.+(SpecialText)anchor/ }
[download]

worked fine when it worked, but sometimes the printout listed odd values. It was a real thump-yourself-on-the-forehead moment when I realized what was happening.

I think a quick example in perlre would help a lot of newbies, and even the occasional old-timer.

Dave