I think you had better add some word boundries in there to avoid catching words that start or end with "sp". 
use Data::Dumper;
$string = "sp Hello there sp \n Hey hey sp How are you? sp I need a ds
+p chip and have a spelling test.";
@results = $string =~ m/\bsp\s+(.*?)\s+sp\b/g;
print Data::Dumper->Dump([\@results]);

__OUTPUT__

$VAR1 = [
          'Hello there',
          'How are you?'
        ];

[download]

--

flounder

In reply to Re: Regular expressions by flounder99
in thread Capturing text between literal string delimiters (was: Regular expressions) by Anonymous Monk

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