How to get a regex to start from the beginning of a string

Question

This is an oddball issue I\'ve encountered (and probably have seen before but never paid attention to).

Here\'s the gist of the code:

my $url = \'htt         


        

Answer 1

The /g modifier, in scalar context, doesn't do what you think it does. Get rid of it.

As perlretut explains, /g in scalar context cycles over each match in turn. It's designed for use in a loop, like so:

while ($str =~ /pattern/g) {
    # match on each occurence of 'pattern' in $str in turn
}

The other way to use /g is in list context:

my @results = $str =~ /pattern/g; # collect each occurence of 'pattern' within $str into @results

If you're using /g in scalar context and you're not iterating over it, you're almost certainly not using it right.