TMTOWTDI:

use strict;
use warnings;

for ('Joe Dolly', 'perl.pl', 'States', 'Fred Fillmore Flintstone')
{
    my @got = split;

    if (scalar @got > 1)
    {
        print substr($_, 0, 1) for @got;
        print "\n";
    }
}
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Output:

 2:16 >perl 1835_SoPW.pl
JD
FFF

 2:17 >
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(If this doesn’t accomplish what you want, you will need to explain what you’re really trying to do with that regular expression.)

Update: If you assign [] to an array, that array contains a single element, which is itself a reference to an empty array. I think you meant to rather assign () (the empty list), which leaves the array empty (zero elements).

Hope that helps,

You're right about assigning with () instead of [].
The part I didn't explain is that the "Test cases" are one at a time and using regular expression seems to be the most straight forward way of doing it.
All I am trying to say in the regexp is, to only SPLIT the string if it has two words, excluding one word and if its a filename( a word followed by a .(dot) ) and letters as extensions.

Is your test actually just a test for whitespace?

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

# Test cases:
my @strings = ("Joe Dolly", # It should split and print JD.
    "perl.pl",   # It should match on the regular expression and nothi
+ng prints.
    "States");    # It should match on the regular expression and noth
+ing prints.

for my $str (@strings) {
    next unless $str =~ /\s/;
    my $out = join '', map { $_ = substr ($_, 0, 1) } split (/\s/, $st
+r);
    print "$out\n";
};
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As I explained above, I can't use an array, the search string comes one at a time, I have a typo on this line:

 my @got = $search_c =~ /^(?!\w)|(\.[^.]+)$/ig ? [] : split //, $strin
+g
+_c;
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It should be:

my @got = $string_c =~ /^(?!\w)|(\.[^.]+)$/ig ? [] : split //, $string
+_c;
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Thanks!

I used a simpler regular expression to do what I want as:

my @got = $string_c !~ /^\w+\s+\w+$/ig ? () : split /\s/, $string_c;
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