Most Esteemed Monks,

what I am attempting to do is a one-line extraction from a regular expression. Now, normally when extracting the results are stored in $1, $2 and so on, and according to the docs when the regex is used in array-context like this:

my @matches = ($text =~ /(stufftoextract)\w(morestufftoextract)/);
[download]

the results will be stored in @matches all nice and tidy. however, what i'm a bit curious about is how to approach the extraction of a single element without having the result stored in an array. When using a similar extraction in scalar context like this:

my $match = $text =~ /(stufftoextract)/;
[download]

$match will be 1 to indicate a succesful match was made. Of course there is a relatively simple method to actually get to the result as follows:

my $match = ($text =~ /(stufftoextract)/)[0];
[download]

What I'm wondering about now is whether there's other ways to get to the same result in a single line of code, so first matching and simply assigning the value of $1 to $match doesn't count ;-)