Can I replace the binding operator with the smartmatch operator in Perl?

How can I write this with the smartmatch operator (~~)?

use 5.010;

my $string = '12 23 34 45 5464 46';

while ( $string =~ /(\d\d)\s/g ) {
    say $1;
}

If we go and look at what these two variants get transformed into, we can see the reason for this.

• First lets look at the original version.

  perl -MO=Deparse -e'while("abc" =~ /(.)/g){print "hi\n"}'
  

  while ('abc' =~ /(.)/g) {
      print "hi\n";
  }
  

  As you can see there wasn't any changing of the opcodes.

• Now if you go and change it to use the smart-match operator, you can see it does actually change.

  perl -MO=Deparse -e'while("abc" ~~ /(.)/g){print "hi\n"}'
  

  while ('abc' ~~ qr/(.)/g) {
      print "hi\n";
  }
  

  It changes it to qr, which doesn't recognize the /g option.

  This should probably give you an error, but it doesn't get transformed until after it gets parsed.

  ---

  The warning you should have gotten, and would get if you used qr instead is:

  syntax error at -e line 1, near "qr/(.)/g"

The smart-match feature was never intended to replace the =~ operator. It came out of the process of making given/when work like it does.

Most of the time, when(EXPR) is treated as an implicit smart match of $_.
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