Arturo is right -- I don't see how anything is getting assigned to $project, since the match does not succeed at all for the initial example.

Trying to match: client.project.subproject where:

• Client and project are manditory. Subproject is optional but, there could be more than one.
• Client, project and subproject could contain, letters, numbers, _, -, or \&

Update:Actually your regex ... works well. Thank you.

Arturo's regex will include both your project and all sub-projects in $2. If that's okay, fine. If not, do it like this:

  /([^.]+)\.([^.]+)/
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