OK, to match those possible characters (and only those) try something like 
m/((?:\w|\\\&|\-)*)\.((?:\w|\\\&|\-)*)/

[download]
the \w takes care of letters, numbers and _. I always escape the - out of habit but is unnecessary. The /i is redundant since the \w is case insensitive.
Personally I would do a nongreedy match. It will match other characters but it probably won't matter. Something like: 
m/(.*?)\.(.*)/

[download]
update -- of course a simple split would do the trick. 
my ($client, $project, $subproject) = split /\./, $x;

[download]

--

flounder

In reply to Re:^3: Regex confusion by flounder99
in thread Regex confusion by neilwatson

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