How can I store regex captures in an array in Perl?

Question

Is it possible to store all matches for a regular expression into an array?

I know I can use ($1,...,$n) = m/expr/g;, but it seems as though that can on

Answer 1

See the manual entry for perldoc perlop under "Matching in List Context":

If the /g option is not used, m// in list context returns a list consisting of the subexpressions matched by the parentheses in the pattern, i.e., ($1 , $2 , $3 ...)

The /g modifier specifies global pattern matching--that is, matching as many times as possible within the string. How it behaves depends on the context. In list context, it returns a list of the substrings matched by any capturing parentheses in the regular expression. If there are no parentheses, it returns a list of all the matched strings, as if there were parentheses around the whole pattern.

You can simply grab all the matches by assigning to an array, or otherwise performing the evaluation in list context:

my @matches = ($string =~ m/word/g);