Dear monks

I'm trying to find the position of the match BEGINNING found with the following Regex, but I have really no idea how. The problem is that I'm searching in a span, so I really do not know how to come to the beginning position (I normally find it counting the length (characters) of the matching variables and "moving back" of that value starting from the pos($text) value).

my $text=<<EOF
I'm trying to find the position of the match BEGINNING found with the 
+following Regex, but I have really no idea how. The problem is that I
+'m searching in a span, so I really do not know how to come to the be
+ginning position (I normally find it counting the length (characters)
+ of the matching variables and "moving back" of that value starting f
+rom the pos($text) value).
EOF
my $UserInputPart1 = "to";
my $UserInputPart1 = "the";

while (($text=~ /$UserInputPart1\W+(?:\w+\W+){0,5}?$UserInputPart2/gi)
+ || ($text=~ /$UserInputPart2\W+(?:\w+\W+){0,5}?$UserInputPart1/gi)){
my $position = pos($text);
print $position . "\n";
}

[download]

In reply to Find initial position of match iin regexp with variable span by Anonymous Monk

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.