Look-ahead is your friend. ($chunk) = /^(.{1,200})(?<!\s)(?!\w)/; That matches as many (up to 200) characters, such that the last character is NOT whitespace, and the next character is NOT a word character.

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Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker.
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;