What does $1 mean in Perl?

What does $1 mean in Perl? Further, what does $2 mean? How many $number variables are there?

The $number variables contain the parts of the string that matched the capture groups ( ... ) in the pattern for your last regex match if the match was successful.

For example, take the following string:

$text = "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.";

After the statement

$text =~ m/ (b.+?) /;

$1 equals the text "brown".

The number variables are the matches from the last successful match or substitution operator you applied:

my $string = 'abcdefghi';

if ($string =~ /(abc)def(ghi)/) {
    print "I found $1 and $2\n";
}

Always test that the match or substitution was successful before using $1 and so on. Otherwise, you might pick up the leftovers from another operation.

Perl regular expressions are documented in perlre.

$1, $2, etc will contain the value of captures from the last successful match - it's important to check whether the match succeeded before accessing them, i.e.

 if ( $var =~ m/( )/ ) { # use $1 etc... }

An example of the problem - $1 contains 'Quick' in both print statements below:

#!/usr/bin/perl

'Quick brown fox' =~ m{ ( quick ) }ix;
print "Found: $1\n";

'Lazy dog' =~ m{ ( quick ) }ix;
print "Found: $1\n";