What's the maximum number of numbered regex captures?

Question

I\'m maintaining some code that reads values over a serial radio and unpacks them into Perl data structures:

# Don\'t yell at me, I didn\'t write this
if (         


        

Answer 1

This script works up to at least $N=5000000. After that, it runs out of memory.

$N = $ARGV[0] || 5000;
$q = '(.)' x $N;
$regex = qr/$q/;
("x" x $N) =~ $regex;
print eval "\$$N";