Regex Group in Perl: how to capture elements into array from regex group that matches unknown number of/multiple/variable occurrences from a string?

Question

In Perl, how can I use one regex grouping to capture more than one occurrence that matches it, into several array elements?

For example, for a string:

Answer 1

A bit over the top maybe, but an excuse for me to look into http://p3rl.org/Parse::RecDescent. How about making a parser?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Parse::RecDescent;

use Regexp::Common;

my $grammar = <<'_EOGRAMMAR_'
INTEGER: /[-+]?\d+/
STRING: /\S+/
QSTRING: /$Regexp::Common::RE{quoted}/

VARIABLE: /var\d+/
VALUE: ( QSTRING | STRING | INTEGER )

assignment: VARIABLE "=" VALUE /[\s]*/ { print "$item{VARIABLE} => $item{VALUE}\n"; }

startrule: assignment(s)
_EOGRAMMAR_
;

$Parse::RecDescent::skip = '';
my $parser = Parse::RecDescent->new($grammar);

my $code = q{var1=100 var2=90 var5=hello var3="a, b, c" var7=test var8=" haha \" heh " var3=hello};
$parser->startrule($code);

yields:

var1 => 100
var2 => 90
var5 => hello
var3 => "a, b, c"
var7 => test
var8 => " haha \" heh "
var3 => hello

PS. Note the double var3, if you want the latter assignment to overwrite the first one you can use a hash to store the values, and then use them later.

PPS. My first thought was to split on '=' but that would fail if a string contained '=' and since regexps are almost always bad for parsing, well I ended up trying it out and it works.

Edit: Added support for escaped quotes inside quoted strings.