Perl match only returning “1”. Booleans? Why?

Question

This has got to be obvious but I\'m just not seeing it.

I have a documents containing thousands of records just like below:

Row:1 DATA:
[0]37755442
[         


        

Answer 1

my($foo) = $record=~ /Defect/;
print STDOUT $foo;

Rather than this you should do

$record =~ /Defect/;
my $foo = $&; # Matched portion of the $record.

As your goal seems to be to get the matched portion. The return value is true/false indicating if match was successful or not.

You may find http://perldoc.perl.org/perlreref.html handy.