Firstly, you don't need a regex to pull the last two characters off your data. Use substr instead...

my $string = "1234,Dr,Huxtable,Cliff,M,24/12/1976,60";
my $last_two_chars = substr($string, -2, 2);
print $last_two_chars . "\n";
[download]

Secondly, as you're passing comma delimited data, just pulling two chars seems over simplified, best to split it by comma (assuming no commas in your data, see Text::CSV for better parsing), give your columns some proper names, and access your data in a readable fashion...

my $temp_col_id = 0;
my %COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME = map {$_, $temp_col_id++} qw(num1 title surnam
+e firstname sex dob num2);


my @split_data = split /,/, $string;
print $split_data[$COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME{num1}] . "\n";
print $split_data[$COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME{title}] . "\n";
print $split_data[$COLUMN_IDS_BY_NAME{firstname}] . "\n";
# etc...
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.