$s = 'I have somwhat large articles of text (returned from a search), what I\'d like to do is capture the word and X number of words before and after it while tagging the matching word in the captured text.';;

print $s =~ m[ ( (?: \S+ \s+ ){3} X (?: \s+ \S+ ){3} ) ]x;;

the word and X number of words

##</code><code>##

#! perl -slw
use strict;

my $word = $ARGV[0] or die "No search term";

( my $text = do{ local $/; <DATA> } ) =~ tr[\n][]d;

$text =~ s[
    ( (?: \S+ \s+ ){1,3} )
    ( $word ) [[:punct:]]*
    (?= ( (?: \s+ \S+ ){1,3} ) )
][
    print "$1<$2>$3"
]gex;

__END__
Regular expressions have always been a weak spot for me, and I've got a
question that's got me stumped. Here's the problem I'm trying to solve.
I have somwhat large articles of text (returned from a search), what I'd
like to do is capture the word and X number of words before and after it
while tagging the matching word in the captured text. My inital thought
was to try something like this. The problem I have is that if there is
more than one term and they overlap, the nth term will not be annotated.
So my next thought is lookahead/lookbehind, but they don't capture.
Is there a way to do this with a single regex? Is a regex even the best
way to do this? Thanks, -Lee


##</code><code>##

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