Once you "catch" them, what do you want to do with them?

Taking one wild guess, which could be totally off, because I can think of about three or four things you might mean, let's say you want to grab all the items that are comma-delimited inside the parens:

$string = "blah blah (name 1, name 2, name 3 and name 4), blah blah (n
+ame 1, name 2, name 3 and name 4)";
@items = map { split /,\*/ } $string =~ /\((.*?)\)/g;
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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker