In Important Notes About Lookbehind, Jan Goyvaerts explains it this way:

The bad news is that most regex flavors do not allow you to use just any regex inside a lookbehind, because they cannot apply a regular expression backwards. Therefore, the regular expression engine needs to be able to figure out how many steps to step back before checking the lookbehind.

In modern versions of Perl, variable-length look-behind is effectively supported using the \K pattern ("K" for "keep"). See perlre.

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw( say );

my $string = 'aaaabcccc';
$string =~ s/a+\Kb(?=c+)/B/;
say $string;

__END__
aaaaBcccc

[download]

In reply to Re: Why is variable length lookahead implemented while lookbehind is not? by Jim
in thread Why is variable length lookahead implemented while lookbehind is not? by Kc12349

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.