I think what I would do is build a list of the prefixes and suffixes around the exclusions of 'ALPHA' -- in your case, @prefixes would be ("_", "#", and "CAW5 ") and @suffixes would be (). Then I'd produce a regex from those:
my (@pre, @suf); for (@exclusions) { my ($p, $s) = split /ALPHA/, $_, 2; push @pre, $p if length $p; push @suf, $s if length $s; } my $pre_rx = join "", map "(?<!\Q$_\E)", @pre; my $suf_rx = join "", map "(?!\Q$_\E)", @suf; my $total_rx = qr/${pre_rx}ALPHA$suf_rx/;
Now you can match your strings against the pattern in $total_rx.

Jeff japhy Pinyan, P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.: Perl, regex, and perl hacker
How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart

In reply to Re: Pattern matching when there are exception strings by japhy
in thread Pattern matching when there are exception strings by Moron

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.