Perl match only returning “1”. Booleans? Why?

Question

This has got to be obvious but I\'m just not seeing it.

I have a documents containing thousands of records just like below:

Row:1 DATA:
[0]37755442
[         


        

Answer 1

From perlop, Quote and Quote-Like operators [bits in brackets added by me]:

/PATTERN/msixpodualgc

Searches a string for a pattern match, and in scalar context returns true [1] if it succeeds, false [undef] if it fails.

(Looking at the section on s/// will also be useful ;-)

Perl just doesn't have a discreet boolean type or true/false aliases so 1 and undef are often used: however, it could very well could be other values without making the documentation incorrect.

$1 will never be defined because there is no capture group: perhaps $& (aka $MATCH) is desired? (Or better, change the regular expression to have a capture group ;-)

Happy coding.