Hello doofus,

To capture the literal parentheses, put them inside the capturing parentheses. But you want the outermost parentheses, so change to a greedy quantifier. And if you know that your input string is such that the text captured in $pin will always precede the text captured in $sig, you can combine the two regular expressions into one:

if ($sp =~ m{ \. ( [^(]* ) ( \( .* \) ) }x)
{
    print "pin = $1\n";
    print "sig = $2\n";
}
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But note that this does not guarantee that the outer parentheses are matched. For that, you will need to use the techniques described in perlfaq6, “Can I use Perl regular expressions to match balanced text?”

Hope that helps,