Actually, your regular expression seems correct (although it could possibly be somewhat simpler) for the description you made (except that I am not sure what you really want to capture) and it works, as shown in this session under the Perl debugger. 
  DB<4> $_ = 'foobar 42';

  DB<5> print $1 if /\b(\s*([a-zA-Z ]+)\s((-?[0-9]){1,2})\b)/g;
foobar 42
  DB<6> $_ = 'foobar 666';

  DB<7>  print $1 if /\b(\s*([a-zA-Z ]+)\s((-?[0-9]){1,2})\b)/g;

  DB<8>

[download]
As you can see, your regex matched foobar 42 but did not match foobar 422, which appears to be what you want.

If that is not what you want, then you should explain what exactly you want, and preferably, as already suggested, please also show some example of what should match (and what should be captured) and what should not match.

In reply to Re: Help with regular expression by Laurent_R
in thread Help with regular expression by heman

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