in reply to How is this printing?

When you use a regular expression to match something (i.e.) $html =~m/<A HREF=\"(.*?)\"/g) the parenthesis around ->.*?<- capture the result of the match, and stores it in a special variable ->$n where n is a number indicating the parenthesis group.

Ok - let me try an example, it may be clearer 

$a="123abc345"
$a=~/123(.*?)345/;    # $1 is now equal to "abc"
$a=~/(123).*?(345)/;  # $1 is now "123" and $2 is "345"
$a=~/(xyz).*/;        # $1 is still "123" because there was 
                      # no match

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Re^2: How is this printing?
by muba (Priest) on Oct 16, 2004 at 14:47 UTC
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      Nope, I'm not exactly sure if I understand what you are asking, but here's my best guess...

      Consider the following code and result 

      foreach ("abc123", "xyz123","def12","ghi123") {
    /(.*)123/;
    print "scanning $_: found $1\n";
}
__DATA__
scanning abc123: found abc
scanning xyz123: found xyz
scanning def12: found xyz
scanning ghi123: found ghi
<code>
Notice that while scanning "<code>def12

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      " the "$1" variable was not reset to undef but remains in its previously defined state.

      Was this what you were asking?

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