Win8 Strawberry 5.8.9.5 (32) Tue 04/06/2021 13:52:38 C:\@Work\Perl\monks\suvendra123 >perl use strict; use warnings; my $rx_pre_dup = qr{ [.(] }xms; my $rx_str = qr{ \b (?: abc_p | abc) \b }xms; my $rx_dup_str = qr{ $rx_pre_dup $rx_str }xms; for my $string ( '.abc', '.abc(pqr)', '.abcfoo(abc)', '.abc.abc', '.abc(abc_p)', '.abc_p.abc', '.abc_p.abc(abc_p)', '.abc_p (abc_p)', ) { my $got_dups = $string =~ m{ $rx_dup_str .*? $rx_dup_str }xms; printf "'$string' has %sdups \n", $got_dups ? '' : 'NO '; } ^Z '.abc' has NO dups '.abc(pqr)' has NO dups '.abcfoo(abc)' has NO dups '.abc.abc' has dups '.abc(abc_p)' has dups '.abc_p.abc' has dups '.abc_p.abc(abc_p)' has dups '.abc_p (abc_p)' has dups