Ah, but you don't need to bother with $regex: 

my $string = "zero   one  two three";
my $offset = 1;
print $string =~ /(?:[^\s]+\s+){$offset}([^\s]+)/;
__END__
one

[download]

And in this case the regex is not large, but may take some time to execute.

Liz

In reply to Re: Re: coding style suggestion by liz
in thread coding style suggestion: (...)[1] vs. [...]->[1] by thens

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