Use a regular expression. From your description, it seems that you want everything except the first and last 2 'words'. I assume that by word you mean something without whitespace. This will work for my interpretation of the problem: 
use strict;
use warnings;

...
my $source_string;
# set the value of $source_string to the original string

$source_string =~ /^\S+\s+\S+\s+(.+)\s+\S+\s+\S+$/;
my $wanted_string = $1;

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In reply to Re: substring extraction by shemp
in thread substring extraction by tpane

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