Further on down in the post, Cody says ...

...but surely there's a smarter way to do it than check there's a match, then extract it with one regex, then remove it from the test string with another?

Perhaps I'm reading the bolded part of that wrong, but it sounds like replacing to me; a notion reinforced by the code snippet given.

The $1 was an oversight, though: an artifact of using -l in my shebang. ;)

    --k.