G'day onlyauto,

Welcome to the monastery.

I see you have a solution to your posted problem. There's another issue I thought I'd point out.

All those if statements:

• duplicate a lot of code
• incur a lot of unnecessary processing
• are error-prone from a maintenance perspective
• do not lend themselves to extensibility

Consider writing your code more along these lines:

#!/usr/bin/env perl -l

use strict;
use warnings;

my @data = ('X_12_yzAAA', 'X_34_yzBBB', 'X_56_yzCCC', 'X_78_yzAAA',);
my $re = qr{^.+_(\d+)_.+([A-C]{3})$};
my %despatch = (
    AAA => sub { print 'found1 with digits: ', shift },
    BBB => sub { print 'found2 with digits: ', shift },
    CCC => sub { print 'found3 with digits: ', shift },
);

/$re/ && $despatch{$2}->($1) for @data;
[download]

Output:

found1 with digits: 12
found2 with digits: 34
found3 with digits: 56
found1 with digits: 78
[download]

Now you have:

• a single regex, only one thing to possibly change here
• no unnecessary processing: all done in a single statement
• less chance of maintenance errors because there's a lot less code
• an easily extensible solution: just add 'DDD => sub { ... }' (or whatever) to %despatch [Update: and change A-C to A-D in one place.]

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