in reply to extract the value before a particualr string

The regex in the following script does exactly what you specify. It extracts the 5-digit value before each "\total" in a single line. 
use strict;
use warnings;
my $in_string
    = "Apples Orances:5433 55552246:777449 Country 457852/total" 
    . " "
    . "Apples Red:9987 green:777449 Public 74585/total"
    . "\n"
    ;
 
my @totals =  $in_string =~ m{ (\d{5}) (?= /total ) }gx;
print "@totals\n";

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Bill

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Re^2: extract the value before a particualr string
by 2teez (Vicar) on Sep 05, 2013 at 12:18 UTC

    Hi,
    with ...(\d{5})... in your regexp, you will only have 57852 instead of 457852 for the first value, since the digits are more that 5.
    Maybe ...(\d{5,})... could help in this case. Or other variation in case the targeted digits are less than 5.

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