You are viewing the version of this documentation from Perl blead. This is the main development branch of Perl. (git commit 233e70e50b57acf34a1003a191ae9a57e8706973)
$MATCH
$&

The string matched by the last successful pattern match. (See "Scoping Rules of Regex Variables".)

See "Performance issues" above for the serious performance implications of using this variable (even once) in your code.

This variable is read-only, and its value is dynamically scoped.

Mnemonic: like & in some editors.