Re^2: capture global substituion inot an array

Yes, I suspected that the real problem lies in my misunderstanding. I imagined that there is a mythical "replace" string that substitutes for the matched string. The "replace" of a regex replace is the entire resulting string, and not some discrete "diff" element. Thanks for helping me understand that better.

Perhaps what I am really looking to do (although it may be ill-conceived) is:

Capture the array of matched substrings based on the first modifier argument
loop through the array, performing a regex substitution on each substring based on the second argument.
return the list of modified substrings

This algorithm is certainly not a standard "regex substitution". I'll have to think more about this to determine if it even makes sense to do. But at least you have helped me define the problem. Thanks!

Comment on Re^2: capture global substituion inot an array

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Re^3: capture global substituion inot an array by ww (Archbishop) on Apr 29, 2012 at 17:45 UTC
Sounds as though perlretut and tutorials re Pattern Matching, Regular Expressions, and Parsing might be useful.	[reply]
Re^3: capture global substituion inot an array by wrinkles (Pilgrim) on Apr 29, 2012 at 17:50 UTC
So now I'm thinking that the tag modifier needs three arguments: The match regex expression to extract the substrings. The substitution regex to perform on these captured substrings. The replace expression. Is that as crazy as it sounds to me? :)	[reply]