Let me reiterate ...

Unfortunately, you're not reiterating anything: none of the example strings you give is the same as any in the OP. I suggest you follow CountZero's approach and post something like

I have the following patterns of data:

• 'name=servername.xyz.abc.coom'
• 'name=servername'
• 'name=servername.xyz.com'
• 'whatever'
• ...

From each of these patterns I want to extract string.

I think I know what you think you want, but why should we play guessing games? The devil is in the details.

Update: Also, what version(s) of Perl must you work with? This has implications for the regex constructs that are available.