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

Note that if you know the number of capturing groups you need per match, you can use this simple approach, which I present as an example (of 2 capturing groups.)

Suppose you have some 'data' like

my $mess = <<'IS_YOURS';
Richard     Rich
April           May
Harmony             Ha\rm
Winter           Win
Faith     Hope
William         Will
Aurora     Dawn
Joy  
IS_YOURS

With the following regex

my $oven = qr'^(\w+)\h+(\w+)$'ma;  # skip the /a modifier if using perl < 5.14

I can capture all 12 (6 pairs, not 8...Harmony escaped and Joy is missing) in the @box below.

my @box = $mess =~ m[$oven]g;

If I want to "hash out" the details of the box I could just do:

my %hash = @box;

Or I just could have just skipped the box entirely,

my %hash = $mess =~ m[$oven]g;

Note that %hash contains the following. Order is lost and dupe keys (if any had existed) are squashed:

(
          'April'   => 'May',
          'Richard' => 'Rich',
          'Winter'  => 'Win',
          'William' => 'Will', 
          'Faith'   => 'Hope',
          'Aurora'  => 'Dawn'
);