Unfortunately, the referenced section does not discuss the zero-width-lookahead-to-a-capture trick of jwkrahn's solution. Does anyone know where this is covered in the standard docs (as opposed to a PerlMonks node)?
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A search on “overlapping matches’ in perldoc doesn’t turn up anything relevant. However, I did find the following in the Camel Book (4th Edition, pages 247–8, underlining added):
Lookahead assertions can be used to implement overlapping matches. For example,
"0123456789" =~ /(\d{3})/g
returns only three strings: 012, 345, and 678. By wrapping the capture group with a lookahead assertion:
"0123456789" =~ /(?=(\d{3}))/g
you now retrieve all of 012, 123, 234, 345, 456, 567, 678, and 789. This works because this tricky assertion does a stealthy sneakahead to run up and grab what’s there and stuff its capture group with it, but being a lookahead, it reneges and doesn’t technically consume any of it. When the engine sees that it should try again because of the /g, it steps one character past where last it tried.
HTH,
Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum
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[d/l]
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