regex operators

I was thinking about adding one or two regex-related features to the engine: 1. "preg_case": this would behave just like case but instead of doing an equality comparison, would match against a regular expression, e.g. switch($data) { preg_case '/^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$/': print "US Postal Code"; break; preg_case '/^[a-z]\d[a-z] ?\d[a-z]\d$/i'; print "Canadian Postal Code"; break; default: print "something else!"; } Where should any captured subpatterns go? 2. A regex match operator that returns an array containing subpatterns. If there is no match against the regex, then an empty array (or just false?) would be returned. if ($data =~ '/^(\d{5})(-\d{4})?$/') { print "The whole postal code is $data[0]."; print "The first five digits is $data[1]."; if ($data[2]) { print "The ZIP+4 is $data[2].";} } Some issues with adding these features: - It creates an engine dependency on the PCRE library. - There would have to be some new opcodes and parser tokens - Ideally the code that implements these operators could share as much as possible with what's already been done in the PCRE extension -- is that possible? Comments? Thanks, David