Course of Raku / Regexes and grammars / Regexes / Adverbs

Global matching

By default, a regex finds only the first match. The :g adverb (short for :global) finds every match in the string. It is written on the m/// operator:

my @all = 'a1b2c3' ~~ m:g/\d/;
say @all;       # [｢1｣ ｢2｣ ｢3｣]
say @all.elems; # 3

With :g, the result behaves like a list of match objects — one for each place the pattern was found. You can count them, loop over them, or turn each into a string:

my @numbers = 'a12 b3 c456' ~~ m:g/\d+/;
say @numbers.map(*.Str).join(', '); # 12, 3, 456

Here \d+ matched three separate runs of digits, and :g collected all of them.

Global matching is the natural tool whenever the question is “how many …” or “all of the …” rather than “is there a …”.

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