David Fetter wrote:
>>
>> The question is, what is the use case? If there is one in Perl, can
>> this proposed function API support it?
>>
>
> Perl makes the following variables available in any regex match,
> although it optimizes some cases for when they're not there:
>
> $1, ... $n (captured matches in parentheses)
> $` (pre-match)
> $' (post-match)
> $& (whole match)
>
>
Use of any of these is notoriously costly, BTW, especially pre-match and
post-match. See perlre man page.
cheers
andrew