> count only the number of spaces at the START of the line
OWTDI:
$_ = ' test ';
/^( *)/; # the parens capture the match into $1
print length $1;
---------------------------
In case you are interested, you tried:
> my $i = () = $str =~ /^\s/;
This would print 0 or 1, depending on whether the regex matched.
$i in your approach is counting the number of chunks matched,
not the length of any of the matched chunks.
To explain this a little further, consider instead:
my $i = () = $str =~ /^(\s)/;
This would also print 0 or 1, depending on whether the regex matched.
All I have done is added explicit capturing parens which were, in your
code, assumed by perl.
Now consider:
my $i = () = $str =~ /^(\s)(\s)/;
This would print 0 or 2, depending on whether the regex matched,
which it would if there was at least two spaces at the start of the
line.
hth
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