named captures that match more than once (Perl)

Question

When I run this code:

$_='xaxbxc';
if(/(x(?<foo>.))+/) {
    say "&: ", $&;
    say "0: ", $-{foo}[0];
    say "1: ", $-{foo}[1];
 }

I get:

&: xaxbxc
0: c
1:

I understand that this is how it's supposed to work, but I would like to be able to somehow get the list of all matches ('a', 'b', 'c') instead of just the last match (c). How can I do this?

Answer 1

I don't think there is a way to do this in general (please correct me if I am wrong), but there is likely to be a way to accomplish the same end-goal in specific situations. For example, this would work for your specific code sample:

$_='xaxbxc';
while (/x(?<foo>.)/g) {
    say "foo: ", $+{foo};
}

What exactly are you trying to accomplish? Perhaps we could find a solution for your actual problem even if there is no way to do repeating captures.

Answer 2

In situations like these, using embeded code blocks provides an easy way out:

my @match;
$_='xaxbxc';
if(/((?:x(.)(?{push @match, $^N}))+)/) {
    say "\$1: ", $1;
    say "@match"
}

which prints:

$1: xaxbxc
a b c