otto letter character 1221 123324 123431564 #### ((\w)(?!\2)(\w)(?!\3|\2)(\w)(?!\4|\3|\2)(\w)\4\2(?!\5|\4|\3|\2)(\w)(?!\6|\5|\4|\3|\2)(\w)\5) #### #!/usr/bin/perl # match.pl use strict; my ($pat, $file) = @ARGV; my $p; { my (%s, %i); my $d = my $c = 1; # our regexp will be inside parens, so first backref is 2 $p = join ( "", map { if($s{$_}++){ "\\".$i{$_} } else{ $i{$_}=++$c; $c>$d+1 ? '(?!'.join('|',map{"\\".abs}-$c+1..-$d-1).")(\\w)" : "(\\w)"; } } split//,$pat ); } print '(',$p,")\n"; open my $fh, '<', $file; my %s; while (<$fh>) { my @l = (); while (/\b($p)\b/g) { push @l, $1 unless $s{$1}++; } print join (", ",@l), $/ if @l; }