in reply to empty hits with regex

You have two capturing parens in the pattern, so the match operator returns two captures when the match operator is successful. Always.

Here's a couple of other solutions: 

my @hits = grep defined, m/(?:c(a)|k(t))/g;

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my @hits;
while ( m/(?:c(a)|k(t))/g ) {
   push @hits, defined $1 ? $1 : $2;
}

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The last one is extensible too: 

my @hits;
while ( m/(?:c(a)|k(t)|k(k))/g ) {
   push @hits, defined $1 ? $1
             : defined $2 ? $2
             : $3
}

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: empty hits with regex
by JavaFan (Canon) on Oct 02, 2008 at 20:38 UTC
    In 5.10, there's a much easier solution: (?|). 
        $_ = "caaat";
    my @hits = /(?|c(a)|k(t))/g;
    say scalar @hits;
    say @hits;
    __END__
    1
    a

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

      You just made me want to get our infrastructure team to upgrade to perl 5.10. Thanks. Now I'm not going to get any real work done next week.

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