Question

I am reading a complete file in a string and then doing a regex match as below:

if($str =~ m/$regex/gc) {
     $offset = $+[0];
}

Using this code, I can capture the position where the last successful match ends.

Now this will give the position as character number.

Is there any way that I can get offset as line number?

What I am doing for now is that I am counting the number of newline characters from beginning of $str upto end $offset.

I want to know is there a direct way to capture line number for a regex match.

Answer 1

Contrary to what one might imagine, Nahuel’s suggestion of using $. is actually doable in this case.

This is because one can read from strings just like files using Perl:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $str = <<EOS;
spam
spam
spam
match
spam
match
EOS

open my $handle, '<', \$str or die $!;

while ( <$handle> ) {

    print $., "\n" if /match/;
}

OUTPUT

4
6