This format looks rather messed up, I doubt that your heuristics will be 100% correct and that Text::CSV can help you here.

Though your problem is that split also returns matched (...) groupings. Disable capturing groupings with (?:...) .

see perlretut#Non-capturing-groupings

update

> followed by a name (these sometimes have hyphens, but I'm not sure I've accounted for that), followed by initials.

I strongly recommend recomposing with sub-regexes like $name and $initial plus /x -flag for readability and maintainability.

you'd quickly discover some bugs I was able to spot (hint: initials are capital letters and A-z is not what you want,, the first entry didn't start with a name but a date... and so on)

Good luck!

Cheers Rolf

PS: Je suis Charlie!

In reply to Re: Regex for splitting a string on a semicolon (conditionally) by LanX
in thread Regex for splitting a string on a semicolon (conditionally) by grouse

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