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
[1]DDG00000010
[2]FALLS
[3]IMAGE
[4]Defect
[5]3
[6]CLOSED

I've managed to get each record separated and I'm now trying to parse out each field.

I'm trying to match the numbered headers so that I can pull out the data that succeeds them but the problem is that my matches are only returning me "1" when they succeed and nothing if they don't. This is happening for any match I try to apply.

For instance, applied to a simple word within each record:

my($foo) = $record=~ /Defect/;
print STDOUT $foo;

prints out out a "1" for each record if it contains "Defect" and nothing if it contains something else.

Alternatively:

$record =~ /Defect/;
print STDOUT $1;

prints absolutely nothing.

$record =~ s/Defect/Blefect/

will replace "Defect" with "Blefect" perfectly fine on the other hand.

I'm really confused as to why the returns on my matches are so screwy. Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to use capturing parentheses to actually capture:

if ($record =~ /(Defect)/ ) {
    print "$1\n";
}

Answer 2

I think what you really want is to wrap the regex in parentheses:

my($foo) = $record=~ /(Defect)/;

In list context, the groups are returned, not the match itself. And your original code has no groups.