$work =~ / (\b(?:Transcribed|Arranged),\b? For [^,^\(^#^-]+)/ )
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Not exactly as you stated the problem, but an extensible approach:

C:\>perl -E "my @work=(\"I Arranged a meet.\", \"Transcribe this\"); 
for $work(@work) { 
    if ($work =~ /Transcribe||Arranged/) {
        say $work; 
    } 
}

I Arranged a meet.
Transcribe this

C:\>
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The \b does nothing useful as you state your problem; alternation is better done with an ||, ("or"). Solving the captures as you need them is left as an exercise.

The || does not work inside a regular expression (well, it does, but it matches anything). Add some more testing strings. Use single| inside a regex, or use two regexes connected by ||.
لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ

Alas, I erred.

The honorable choroba is correct; blame simple carelessness; intermittent, inadequate internet access in my second consecutive month on the road and my plain errror for the wrongful use of ||. As written above it should be a single Vbar; as choroba notes, it could also be written as:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use 5.10.0;
my @work=("I Arranged a meet.", "Transcribe this", "Shud Not MATCH");
for $work(@work) {
    if (($work =~ /Transcribe/) || ($work =~ /Arranged/) ) {
          say $work; 
    } 
}
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This line Transcribed, For David Jones #
This line Arranged, For Mike Johnson (great)
Terrible weather today
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#!/bin/perl
my $file='regex.txt';
my $work = do {
   local $/;
   open my $fh, "<", $file
    or die "could not open $file: $!";
   <$fh>;
};
while ($work =~ /(Transcribed|Arranged),\s+For\s+([\w\s]+)/g) {
  print "Match: $1 Person: $2\n";
}
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Match: Transcribed Person: David Jones
Match: Arranged Person: Mike Johnson
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The \b (word boundary) matches have been removed as they don't really do anything. Note that it looks for (Transcribed|Arranged) as suggested by other The code looks for normal alpha characters and spaces as a name, terminating on the first that doesn't match, but this can be easily changed

Thank you all for your efforts. I see I should have been clearer about what I want. Here goes.

The script I'm writing will process about 180,000 lines of a text file, each of which is the title of work of music. The data is a mess-- there's no consistency at all. My job is to put it into a consistent format.

To take out the instrument type, I used this regex:

    if ( $work =~ / (For [^,^\(^#^-]+)/ )
...
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...to grab anything between the word "For" and a comma, open parenth pound sign, or hyphen. No problem. But I saw that some works have the text "Transcribed, For" OR "Arranged, For". In those cases, I want to grab the word "Transcribed" OR "Arranged" as well.

state-o-dis-array's solution would seem work, but doesn't. It actually doesn't even catch a simple example like the first below:

INPUT:
Tirana Alla Spagnola (Rossinizzatta), For Soprano & Piano (Péchés De Vieillesse, Book 1), Qr Iv/30
À La Chapelle Sixtine, Transcribed, For Orchestra, S 360 (Lw G26)
All Through The Night, Traditional Welsh Song Arranged, For Mixed Voices


DESIRED POST-REGEX OUTPUT:
Tirana Alla Spagnola (Rossinizzatta), (Péchés De Vieillesse, Book 1), Qr Iv/30
À La Chapelle Sixtine, S 360 (Lw G26)
All Through The Night, Traditional Welsh Song


(NOTE that I'm saving the instrument type in another variable, but that's not the problem.) To answer abualiga's question, I need the '?' non-greedy quantifier because not every line will have "Transcribed" or "Arranged" in it. I realize I could use a few different regex's connected with the OR operator '||', but I have so many different cases that it starts getting very long and tedious. It may come to that, though.

To answer ww and space_monk, I think I need to have the '\b' word boundaries in there so I can use the '?'.

Here's an approach for the 'simple' input you give as an example. A larger chunk (but still a reasonable amount!) of more realistic input might yield a better solution. I see some other, similar postings from you – is there another thread on this with more data?

Notes:


• I use \x23 instead of a '#' character in the  [^-,^(\x23] character set below because of a peculiarity of my little command-line processor. You should just use '#' instead. (BTW: I'm not sure what all the '^' (carat) characters were doing in this set as originally posted, so I left one in there just for good luck!)
• The input text I use does not have accented characters. I can't display these easily on my console and so cannot test them.
• Because I do not use accented characters in my test input text, the regexes are untested with such characters. (Update: See Update 1 below.)
• As to the input text: Note that word 'Arranged' in the third record (i.e., line) has no preceding comma: 'Welsh Song Arranged'. Is this an example of real input, or a posting tyop? In any event, the code as it stands handles this variation.
• I concentrate on extracting what I take to be the critical fields from each record: the title of the piece and its source. You can stitch them together how you want, with commas, whitespace, whatever.
• Sorry for any wrap-around in the code listing.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my @input = (
   'Tirana Alla Spagnola (Rossinizzatta), For Soprano & Piano (Peches 
+De Vieillesse, Book 1), Qr Iv/30',
   'A La Chapelle Sixtine, Transcribed, For Orchestra, S 360 (Lw G26)'
+,
   'All Through The Night, Traditional Welsh Song Arranged, For Mixed 
+Voices',
   );
 ;;
 my $not_source = qr{ [^-,^(\x23] }xms;
 my $kruft  = qr{ \s* ,? \s* }xms;
 my $ar_tr  = qr{ Arranged | Transcribed }xms;
 my $at_for = qr{
   $kruft $ar_tr? $kruft For $not_source+ $kruft
   }xms;
 my $rx_title = qr{ (?! $at_for) . }xms;
 ;;
 for (@input) {
   print qq{[[$_]]};
   my ($title, $source) =
     m{ \A \s* ($rx_title+) $at_for (.*?) \s* \z }xms
     ;
   print qq{:$title:  :$source:};
   }
"
[[Tirana Alla Spagnola (Rossinizzatta), For Soprano & Piano (Peches De
+ Vieillesse, Book 1), Qr Iv/30]]
:Tirana Alla Spagnola (Rossinizzatta):  :(Peches De Vieillesse, Book 1
+), Qr Iv/30:
[[A La Chapelle Sixtine, Transcribed, For Orchestra, S 360 (Lw G26)]]
:A La Chapelle Sixtine:  :S 360 (Lw G26):
[[All Through The Night, Traditional Welsh Song Arranged, For Mixed Vo
+ices]]
:All Through The Night, Traditional Welsh Song:  ::
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Updates:

1. I have since tried this code as a regular source file with accented characters, and it seems to work.
2. Actually,  m{ \A \s* (.*?) $at_for (.*?) \s* \z }xms works just as well (for the limited test set), is probably a bit faster.

Okay:

#!/bin/perl

my $file='regex.txt';
 open my $fh, "<", $file
    or die "could not open $file: $!";
while (<$fh>) {
  chomp;
  if (  /(.*?)\s?(Transcribed|Arranged)?,\s+For\s+([^(,]+),?(.*)/) {
     print "$1$4\n";
     print STDERR "# Instrument: $3 T/A:$2\n";
  }
}
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Using your input, ./program.pl 2>/dev/null output is:

Tirana Alla Spagnola (Rossinizzatta)(Péchés De Vieillesse, Book 1), Qr
+ Iv/30
À La Chapelle Sixtine, S 360 (Lw G26)
All Through The Night, Traditional Welsh Song
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agree with ww. The '||' operator may be better suited here than the word boundary '\b'. Also, what are you trying with the '?' non-greedy quantifier? Are you looking for lines starting with these words? Perhaps I'm missing something, but you would probably benefit more from providing some input data.

why not try:

if( $inputStr =~ /^(Arranged\,|Transcribe\,)/ ){
   ### do your stuff
}
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Put this in music.pl and then go perl -n music.pl < data_file 2>/dev/null

  chomp;
  if (  /(.*?)\s?(Transcribed|Arranged)?,\s+For\s+([^(,]+),?(.*)/) {
     print "$1$4\n";
     print STDERR "# Instrument: $3 T/A:$2\n";
  }
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