Match regex and assign results in single line of code

Question

I want to be able to do a regex match on a variable and assign the results to the variable itself. What is the best way to do it?

I want to essentially combine lines 2 a

Answer 1

Well, you could say

my $variable;
($variable) = ($variable = "find something soon") =~ /(find something).*/;

or

(my $variable = "find something soon") =~ s/^.*?(find something).*/$1/;

Answer 2

Why do you want it to be shorter? Does is really matter?

$variable = $1 if $variable =~ /(find something).*/;

If you are worried about the variable name or doing this repeatedly, wrap the thing in a subroutine and forget about it:

 some_sub( $variable, qr/pattern/ );
 sub some_sub { $_[0] = $1 if eval { $_[0] =~ m/$_[1]/ }; $1 };

However you implement it, the point of the subroutine is to make it reuseable so you give a particular set of lines a short name that stands in their place.

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Several other answers mention a destructive substitution:

( my $new = $variable ) =~ s/pattern/replacement/;

I tend to keep the original data around, and Perl v5.14 has an /r flag that leaves the original alone and returns a new string with the replacement (instead of the count of replacements):

my $match = $variable =~ s/pattern/replacement/r;

Answer 3

From Perl Cookbook 2nd ed 6.1 Copying and Substituting Simultaneously

$dst = $src;
$dst =~ s/this/that/;

becomes

($dst = $src) =~ s/this/that/;

I just assumed everyone did it this way, amazed that no one gave this answer.