I think you need to anchor the end not the start of your match.

something like /(.*?)(AND|OR|$)/g

if you really need the preceding AND|OR do a positive look ahead

/(AND|OR)(.+?)(?=AND|OR|$)/g

sorry can't test ATM.

(Hopefully you don't expect this to work with nested ANDs and ORs within the parens?)

update

looks good for me HTH

  DB<100> $str = q!AND (random text) AND (more random text) AND (yet m
+ore)!;
 => "AND (random text) AND (more random text) AND (yet more)"

  DB<101> print "$1: $2\n" while $str =~ /(AND|OR)(.+?)(?=AND|OR|$)/g
AND:  (random text) 
AND:  (more random text) 
AND:  (yet more)

[download]

update

if you can deal with leading empty strings try split

  DB<103> @matches = split /(AND|OR)/,$str
 => (
  "",
  "AND",
  " (random text) ",
  "AND",
  " (more random text) ",
  "AND",
  " (yet more)",
)

[download]

Cheers Rolf

( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)

In reply to Re: simple perl regex question (or is it?) by LanX
in thread simple perl regex question (or is it?) by cadphile

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.