Fellow Monasterians,

This one had me stumped! And while I did get it to work, I'm curious why this happens. Basically, the difference between the two examples is that the top one attempts to assign the backreference after the conditional block (returns undef) and the bottom one does it for each condition (and returns a value successfully). Question: why this behavior?

use strict;

my $string = "This is a regex test";
my ($condition, $match);

if ($condition) {
    $string =~ /(is a)/;
} else {
   $string =~ /(regex)/;
}

$match = $1;
print $match."\n";
[download]

And the winner:

if ($condition) {
   $string =~ /(is a)/;
   $match = $1;
} else {
   $string =~ /(regex)/;
   $match = $1;
}

print $match."\n";
[download]

Thanks, all!

Update: Scooped by scope again! Thanks all, I knew there had to be an explanation somewhere, as the Camel was strangely silent on the topic.