Evaluating a match operator in list context will return a list of the contents of the match's captures. Example:

my $string = 'abcde';
my @captures = $string =~ m/.(.)(.)(.)./;
print "$_\n" for @captures;
__END__
b
c
d
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What I think you're attempting to construct is a symbolic reference named by user input. That's a bad idea, as the user could access any global variable in your program, intentionally or unintentionally. Just capture into an array as demonstrated above.

Don't worry, the user was only able to enter a positive integer (anything else if rejected ^^)
Any way your solution worked gr8, thx.

Looking back now, I should've know it returns a list of matches, considering I learned long ago (by experimenting), that it returns the number of matches (in scalar context),
So I've earned myself some mto point ^^
Thx again

It looks like you need something like this:

$ perl -le'my $fromUserNumber = shift; $_ = " a b c d "; /(.) (.) (.) 
+(.)/ and print substr $_, $-[$fromUserNumber], $+[$fromUserNumber] - 
+$-[$fromUserNumber]'  2
b

$ perl -le'my $fromUserNumber = shift; $_ = " a b c d "; /(.) (.) (.) 
+(.)/ and print substr $_, $-[$fromUserNumber], $+[$fromUserNumber] - 
+$-[$fromUserNumber]'  3
c
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my @matches = map {;no strict 'refs'; $$_} 1 .. $#-;
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¹You can not always capture the return values of the match and get the same effect.

Can you give one clear example of how you want this to work?

I would suggest writing some text explanation of what you think should happen.

The user choses both the value of $fromUserNumber and of $pat
when $fromUserNumber in a positive integer !
I wanted that when $fromUserNumber == 1 the line will be
@simMatches = map{$_ =~ s/$pat/$1/} @simMatches;
when $fromUserNumber == 2 the line will be
@simMatches = map{$_ =~ s/$pat/$2/} @simMatches; and so on.

When you think of a subset of an array, think grep.
Use map only when you think of transforming one thing into another.
Perl variables can be interpolated into a regex expression.


my $pat = "somepattern";
@simMatches = grep{/$pat$num/} @simMatches; # subset of @simMatches
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Show a couple of lines of actual data and this can all become clear.
$1 or $2 are regex capture variables that don't seem to play a role here.

chomp(my $input = <STDIN>);
my @simMatches = qw(abcd wxyz);
my $pat        = qr/(.)..(.)/;
@simMatches = map{ @_ = /$pat/; s/$pat/$_[$input-1]/; $_ }@simMatches;
print join $", @simMatches;

__END__
$input == 1;
a w

$input == 2;
d z
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