Rather than index, which will not accept a pattern, use a character class in a capturing regex, match globally in a while loop and use the @- array, see perlvar. Note that a hyphen (-) in a character class has to be the first or last character or it will be interpreted as a range constructor, e.g. [a-z].

$ perl -E '
> $line =
>    q{The line, as specified, has: no digits (0 to 9); letters!};
> say qq{>$1< found at $-[ 0 ]} while
>    $line =~ m{([ (),.;:?!-])}g;'
> < found at 3
>,< found at 8
> < found at 9
> < found at 12
>,< found at 22
> < found at 23
>:< found at 27
> < found at 28
> < found at 31
> < found at 38
>(< found at 39
> < found at 41
> < found at 44
>)< found at 46
>;< found at 47
> < found at 48
>!< found at 56
$
[download]

I hope this is helpful.

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