This is a live mirror of the Perl 5 development currently hosted at https://github.com/perl/perl5
Support for nocapture regexp flag /n
This flag will prevent () from capturing and filling in $1, $2, etc...
Named captures will still work though, and if used will cause $1, $2, etc...
to be filled in *only* within named groups.
The motivation behind this is to allow the common construct of:
/(?:b|c)a(?:t|n)/
To be rewritten more cleanly as:
/(b|c)a(t|n)/n
When you want grouping but no memory penalty on captures.
You can also use ?n inside of a () directly to avoid capturing, and
?-n inside of a () to negate its effects if you want to capture.