G'day sbrothy,

It sounds like you just need "split /\W+/, $string"; although, I don't know what the "C++ Boost" connection is. 

$ perl -E 'say for split /\W+/, " THIS is a variable number of words, 
+spaces  and  punctuation. "'

THIS
is
a
variable
number
of
words
spaces
and
punctuation

[download]

Is the string you showed representative of your data? Do you have words with hyphens or apostrophes? Are sentences with leading whitespace normal?

The simplicity of my solution may be invalid. Perhaps you need something closer to: 

$ perl -E 'say for split /[ ,.]+/, " THIS is a variable number of word
+s, spaces  and  punctuation. " =~ s/^[ ,.]*//r'
THIS
is
a
variable
number
of
words
spaces
and
punctuation

[download]

— Ken

In reply to Re: Regex match for Any number of words? by kcott
in thread Regex match for Any number of words? by sbrothy

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.