(tye)Re: Elegant way to parse an optional prefix with default?

You've hit a non-DWIMism. $@ is getting expanded into the value of that scalar. If you escape the $ then you can do: my( $sigil )= ( $name =~ /^([\$@%&<*])/, '&' );

- tye (just ignore this answer to the wrong question)

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Re: (tye)Re: Elegant way to parse an optional prefix with default? by John M. Dlugosz (Monsignor) on Nov 08, 2002 at 17:04 UTC
Yow! I didn't know it did that in character classes. Interesting... this relies on undef being dropped in list catenation, so '&' becomes the first element?	[reply]
(tye)Re2: Elegant way to parse an optional prefix with default? by tye (Sage) on Nov 08, 2002 at 17:31 UTC
Whether to treat $ and @ as literals or not inside a regular expression is the single most complicated case of DWIM in Perl. It calculates weights to make this decision. I hate that it results in `/[$]/` being a syntax error. And it is good that character classes are not exempted as `$anagram !~ /[^\Q$word\E]/` is actually useful code. Yes, if you turn on warnings you'll get "Use of uninitialized value in pattern match (m//)". - tye	[reply] [d/l] [select]