How can I do a global regular expression match in Perl?

Question

I am trying to come up with a regular expression in Perl matching multiple patterns and returning all of them like preg_match_all in PHP does.

Here\'s w

Answer 1

The Perl equivalent to

preg_match_all('/(test|data|string)/', 'testdatastring', $m)

is

@m = ("testdatastring" =~ m/(test|data|string)/g);

The /g flag stands for global, so it returns a list of matches in list context.

Answer 2

See http://www.anaesthetist.com/mnm/perl/regex.htm . Basic syntax (from there) is:

$_ = "alpha xbetay xgammay xdeltay so on";
($first, $second, $third) = /x(.+?)y/g;

Note the /g