Perhaps since you're only interested in one 'word' you could save Perl the bother of capturing all of them:

  print ( $str =~ /(?:\w+\W+){3}(\w+)/ ), "\n";

[download]

Of course having n (3 in this case) buried inside the regex doesn't exactly make for a general solution.

In reply to Re: Capturing the nth word in a string by grantm
in thread Capturing the nth word in a string by Roger

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