The string following whatever was matched by the last successful pattern match (not counting any matches hidden within a BLOCK or eval()
enclosed by the current BLOCK). Example:
local $_ = 'abcdefghi';
/def/;
print "$`:$&:$'\n"; # prints abc:def:ghi
The use of this variable anywhere in a program imposes a considerable performance penalty on all regular expression matches. To avoid this penalty, you can extract the same substring by using "@-". Starting with Perl 5.10, you can use the /p
match flag and the ${^POSTMATCH}
variable to do the same thing for particular match operations.
This variable is read-only and dynamically-scoped.
Mnemonic: '
often follows a quoted string.