Perl Regular Expression - What does gc modifier means?

Question

I have a regex which matches some text as:

$text =~ m/$regex/gcxs

Now I want to know what \'gc\' modifier means:

I hav

Answer 1

The /g modifier is used to remember the "position in a string" so you can incrementally process a string. e.g.

my $txt = "abc3de";
while( $txt =~ /\G[a-z]/g )
{
    print "$&";
}
while( $txt =~ /\G./g )
{
    print "$&";
}

Because the position is reset on a failed match, the above will output

abcabc3de

The /c flag does not reset the position on a failed match. So if we add /c to the first regex like so

my $txt = "abc3de";
while( $txt =~ /\G[a-z]/gc )
{
    print "$&";
}
while( $txt =~ /\G./g )
{
    print "$&";
}

We end up with

abc3de

Sample code: http://ideone.com/cC9wb