I have a need for a substr() like function that works on words, rather than characters; for purposes of this discussion, we'll assume a word is a sequence of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace.

Tilly gave me a code snippet which I have hacked into the following: 

if ($window_start > 0) {
        $text_body =~ /\S+/g foreach 1..$window_start;
        $start_index = pos($text_body); 
}  else {
        $start_index = 0;
}

$text_body =~ /\S+/g foreach 1..$window_size; 

$end_index = pos($text_body); 

$windowed_text = substr($text_body, $start_index, ($end_index - $start
+_index));

[download]

Here's my problem: The first match works perfectly. $start_index gets set appropriately for the $window_start'th word. The second match doesn't work at all. Even if $window_start is 0, and this the second match is the only match.

All I can think is that either I don't understand something, or I'm seeing what I know I wrote rather than what I wrote -- but I've tried to rule out the latter.

In reply to Slicing a string on words by dstar

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