Apart from the typos, the reason is that \w+ will gobble up all the word characters in $str, which includes the number at the end. Since your match specifies 'zero or more' numbers at then end, $num gets an empty string. You need to modify the regex to make the \w+ non-greedy, using the ? modifier:

my $str = "abdbdr23";
my ( $name, $num ) = ( $str =~ /^(\w+?)(\d*)$/ );

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* is a much less ghastly way of writing {0,}.

In reply to Re: Simple regular expression problem by polypompholyx
in thread Simple regular expression problem by jeanluca

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