Re: WARNING!! Possible Brainbench spoilers (do NOT read unless you've taken and passed the cert)

my $data = "Hello World" =~ /(.*) (.*)/;

Is two statements in one. Look at it as:

my $data = ("Hello World" =~ /(.*) (.*)/);

or more clearly. Assign the output of

"Hello World" =~ m/(.*) (.*)/);

my $data

The expression

"Hello World" =~ m/(.*) (.*)/;

says to "run the match (m//) operator against the fixed string "Hello World". The output of the match operator is whether it matched: 1 (yes) 0 (no). Since Hello World matches 0 or more characters, a space, followed by 0 or more characters it returns 1 and the output of that is assigned to $data hence it has a value of 1.

From "man perlop"

"In scalar context, each execution of "m//g" finds the next match, returning true if it matches, and false if there is no further match.

That one is from the man pages too. "man perlmod"

A "BEGIN" subroutine is executed as soon as possible, that is, the moment it is completely defined, even before the rest of the containing file is parsed.

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