Question

I have a text file like so:

dave ran very quickly
dan very slowly ran

I am doing a regex to look for the word “ran” but I also need to know where it starts (in the first case it is character 6, in the second case it’s 17).

I have (though it isn’t much):

for(@lines){

if(/ran/){
 # find where ran is so we can continue parsing

}

} 

Answer 1

It’s easy:

my $ran_pos = $-[0];

See the perlvar man page for a detailed description of the @- array.