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From: ckclark@athena.mit.edu
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Bug with $` in s///; in 4.000,4.003
Message-ID: <1991Apr20.193701.17201@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU>
Date: 20 Apr 91 19:37:01 GMT
Sender: mmdf@uvaarpa.Virginia.EDU (Uvaarpa Mail System)
Reply-To: ckclark@athena.mit.edu
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 22


A problem occurs when trying to replace tabs with spaces using the
invocation:

while (<>) {
    1 while s/\t+/' 'x (length($&) * 8 - length($`) % 8)/e;
    print;
}

(taken from the Gospel According to lwall, Chapter 3, pg. 105, footnote 31)

When I run it in 3.044, it works fine, but when I try it in 4.000 or
4.003, it acts as if length($`) is 0; i.e., as if $` is not bring set.

I have not seen anything in the documentation which indictates that this
behavior change is intentional.  Am I missing something?

-Calvin

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