You can simplify this: 
my $Are = '^(.*)' . join('(.*)', @A) . '(.*)$';

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Like so: 
my $Are = join '(.*)', '^', @A, '$';

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I'd also use a nongreedy .*? there instead.

You provided a code base I liked quite a bit and couldn't stop tinkering with though - that temporary @A was annoying. :) Eventually it occured to me I could just capture the matches from $A as well: 

my $Are = join '(.*?)', '^', (map "($_)", $A =~ /(.)/sg), '$';

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Now it all goes in a single array where every odd element is guaranteed to be one character long, while every even element may have any length incl zero. With that in mind, I wrote a cleanup loop and eventually arrived at this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $A = 'ATGGAGTCGACGAATTTGAAGAAT';
my $B = 'xxxxxxATGGAGyxxxTCGAzxxxxCGAATTTGAAxxwGAAT';

my $Are = join '(.*?)', '^', (map "($_)", $A =~ /(.)/sg), '$';

(my @introns = $B =~ m/$Are/)
    or die "There was no possible way to match the input.";

my @seq;
while(@introns) {
    my $match = shift @introns;
    if(@seq and not $match) {
        $seq[-1] .= shift @introns || '';
        next;
    }
    push @seq, $match;
}

print "$A\n@seq\n";

__END__
ATGGAGTCGACGAATTTGAAGAAT
xxxxxx ATGGAG yxxx TCGA zxxxx CGAATTTGAA xxw GAAT

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Update: hrm.. it doesn't work so well anymore once you substitute "real" sequences for the dummy characters in $B..

ATGGAGTCGACGAATTTGAAGAAT
ATGGAG A T GGAGT CGA T CGAA G T CACCGAA TT T GAA TTT GAAT

I suspect nearly the same is true for theorbtwo's code due to the nature of pattern matching.

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re^2: Complicated pattern match by Aristotle
in thread Complicated pattern match by dr_jgbn

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