your have been given valuable answers already, but I would suggest two possible improvements in terms of readability and ease of regex construction:

- using non-greedy quantifiers rather than negated character class for matching what is between square brackets

- creating first a sub-regex and use it then 3 times.

Possibly something like this:

$_ = "[part1-date] info - [..part2..] [..part3..] part4";
$part = qr /\[(.+?)]/;      # subregex using non-greedy quantifier (sl
+ightly easier than /\[([^]]+)\]/)
print "$1 $2 $3" if /$part \w+ - $part $part \w+/;     # prints "part1
+-date ..part2.. ..part3.."
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