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.