Another good regex-related one is blindly assuming a match succeeded and geting "stale" results from the last one which was successful sitting in $1 and friends.

Hah, I hated that one! Out of curiosity, what is the best method of fixing it? Undefining $1 before the regex (not sure if that is possible), testing to see if the regex is successful, or something else?

And you didn't even know bears could type.

Do the match in list context, and don't use $\d+ at all

if (@kitties = $string =~ /pattern (with) captures/) {
  paw_at @kitties;
}
[download]

Obviously you can use my($cats, $kittens) in place of @kitties there.

The other option is check that the match succeeded first

if ($string =~ /pattern (with) captures/) {
  paw_at $1;
}
[download]

but $1 is ugly... unpacking into either an array or bundle of scalars will get you less maintenence-programmer hate.

@_=qw; ask f00li5h to appear and remain for a moment of pretend better than a lifetime;;s;;@_[map hex,split'',B204316D8C2A4516DE];;y/05/os/&print;