Very nice solution, tye!!

There's a small typo in the regex (a surplus parenthesis), so here goes the code again, corrected 

$window_size--;
my( $windowed_text )= $text_body =~
    /^\s*(?:\S+\s+){$window_start}(\S+(?:\s+\S+){0,$window_size})/;

[download]
What I wanted to add is that Perl handles the boundary cases very nicely, so no extra handling required for $window_start = 0 or $window_size = 0. This means 
$_ = q/01234/;
/^..{0}/;    # matches '0'
/^..{0,0}/;  # matches '0'
/^..{0,-1}/; # doesn't match at all

[download]
which is exactly what we need for the code to work fine.

-- Hofmator

In reply to Re: (tye)Re: Slicing a string on words by Hofmator
in thread Slicing a string on words by dstar

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