That's a good and very natural approach to the problem. What most other posters here didn't consider is that the whole sequence is stored in a string. This string might be read in from a file but doesn't have to be, so all these while (<FILE>) {...} approaches might not work.

However - especially if the string is long - your double splitting might be doing a lot of unnecessary extra work. First creating an array by splitting on '\n', then a second array by splitting each line and then slicing this array.

If the data is really as simple and consistent as is given in the example, this will do as well with much less effort

my $data = <<STR;
BC001593 91 NPSL
BC001593 262 NASS
BC001593 293 NAST
STR

my @nums = $data =~ /\s(\d+)\s/g;
print join(', ', @nums), $/;

[download]

If the real string differs from the given example and the lines contain e.g. more 'whitespace surrounded numbers', then the regex has to be massaged accordingly. Nevertheless the general idea should still work.

-- Hofmator

In reply to Re: Re: matching every occurrence of a regex by Hofmator
in thread matching every occurrence of a regex by Becky

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