in reply to uninitialized value $_ in pattern match (m//)

use strict; use warnings; use 5.010; my $line = '<suite subfamily="Database Connect - SQL" name="DBMgrTest" + family="Databases">'; my $pattern = q{ <suite \s* subfamily="(.*?)" \s* name="(.*?)" \s* family="(.*?)" }; if ( my ($subfamily, $name, $family) = ($line =~ /$pattern/xms) ) { #Successful match, and the left hand side of the equals sign #is a list, and in list context m// returns a list of the #matches for the parenthesized groups say $subfamily; say $name; say $family; } --output:-- Database Connect - SQL DBMgrTest Databases
But that pattern is very brittle. What happens if the attributes are in a different order? Or if there are spaces before or after the = sign? Or if there are single quotes instead of double quotes? HTML and XML are hard to parse, so if there is already a well known module like XML::Simple available, learn how to use that instead.