[ILUG] [OT] perl help

[Paul Jakma]

as per kevin l.'s suggestion i've decided to try my hand at perl
(and cause this list could do with a spate of perl newbie questions)..

so i'm trying to capture parts of the results of a /regex/ into
variables, eg something along the lines of:

basically i'm trying to figure out how to do something like the
following:

while (<MSGS> ) {
        if (/^([A-Za-z]{3}) ([0-9]{2}) ([0-9{2}).*$regex[$i]/) {
                $month[$i] = \1;
                $date[$i] = \2;
                $hour[$i] = \3       
}

how do it? how can i catch what \1, \2 and \3 match and store them in
variables?

thanks,

--paulj