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Perl / Strings and Regex

Named captures

Learn named captures in Perl through a focused explanation, a dedicated topic-specific example, an engineering boundary, and a mastery check.

10 min read • Beginner

named captures is an atomic Perl topic inside Strings and Regex. The example uses the named construct directly so you can see its syntax, data flow, and observable behavior.

Read the code by locating the exact feature named named captures, then trace the value before and after that feature runs. This lesson is intentionally isolated from neighboring topics: changing identifiers alone would not reproduce the same behavior because the construct itself is different.

Topic-specific example

perl-0015-2d424d85b4.pl
perl Try It Live 
my $s="id=42"; $s =~ /id=(?<id>\d+)/; print "$+{id}\n";
Edge case / engineering note

For named captures, test the boundary that makes the feature meaningful: invalid input, an empty value, a missing branch, lifecycle/cleanup, or a type/runtime constraint. Do not infer correctness only from the happy path.

Content source & attribution
Original Syntaxis Content · Original Syntaxis Content

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