You have sort of copied an example straight out of the Perlretut without really understanding what it does.

I would say that not everything that you read in the tutorials is common - there are some very complicated and rare things - and this is one of them!

This is so rare, that I don't think that it is worth delving into the mind-numbing details. VERY seldom do you even care in the slightest about the pos(position) of a match - that is 'C' thinking.

Perl regex is most commonly used to capture stuff that is between other stuff and whether this happens at index 5 or 95 usually just doesn't make any difference at all. The purists would say: "well sometimes it does matter" and I would agree with them. What I am saying here is that the pos() almost always does not matter.

I show some more common ideas in Perl below.

#!usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $x =  "Mmm...donut, thought... Homer...Yech...peas";
my @matches = $x =~ /(Mmm|Yech)\.\.\.(donut|peas)/g;
print "number of matches is: ".@matches."\n"; 
print "matches are: @matches\n";  

print "\n";
$x =  "MmmABCdonut, thought... HomerABXYechABYpeas";
my @moreMatches = $x =~ /(?:Mmm|Yech)(...)(?:donut|peas)/g;
print "moreMatches number: ".@moreMatches,"\n";
print "@moreMatches\n";

__END__
prints:
number of matches is: 4
matches are: Mmm donut Yech peas

moreMatches number: 2
ABC ABY
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