Can someone explain why my match behaves differently whether or not the alternation is enclosed within a capture group?
Is this possibly due to the old version of Perl (which I have no control over, sadly), or am I misunderstanding something? My understanding was that the parentheses were a convention for some people but otherwise unnecessary in this case.
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[~]$ perl -e 'print "match\n" if ("getnew" =~ /^get|put|remove$/);'
match
[~]$ perl -e 'print "match\n" if ("getnew" =~ /^(get|put|remove)$/);'
[~]$
^get|put|remove$ finds ^get or put or remove$. So, "getnew" matches the pattern because it starts with get.
Whereas ^(get|put|remove)$ finds ^get$ or ^put$ or ^remove$.