On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 08:59:44PM -0500, Jonathan Levi via macperl wrote:
> Can someone explain why the following:
>
> echo alphabet | perl -e '$_=<STDIN>; if (m/pha/){print $PREMATCH, "\n"}'
>
> yields "" instead of "al", as I expected?
>
> Jonathan
If you want the long name, you need to use the English module, as
mentioned near the top of perlvar <http://perldoc.perl.org/perlvar.html>.
For example:
echo alphabet | perl -MEnglish -e '$_=<STDIN>; if (m/pha/){print $PREMATCH,
"\n"}'
Using /p and ${^PREMATCH}, as Matthew suggested, will avoid performance
penalties in longer scripts, however.
Ronald
