Appreciate the help, though a couple issues. 1. I need to find multiple matches.
2. This fails on some input.

Take "and" for example. 
#! perl -slw
use strict;

my $word = $ARGV[0] or die "No search term";

( my $text = do{ local $/; <DATA> } ) =~ tr[\n][]d;

$text =~ s[
    ( (?: \S+ \s+ ){1,3} )
    ( $word ) [[:punct:]]*
    (?= ( (?: \s+ \S+ ){1,3} ) )
][
    print "$1<$2>$3"
]gex;

__END__
this finds and matches and highlights matches.

[download]
This outputs
this finds <and> matches and highlights matches <and> highlights matches.

-Lee

perl digital dash (in progress)

In reply to Re^2: Regex: Matching around a word(s) by shotgunefx
in thread Regex: Matching around a word(s) by shotgunefx

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