For parsing a delimited text format like the one you've described, use split. Even if the next person who has to maintain your code is a "regex expert", assuming they know perl they'll expect split to be used in cases like this. As for your example, I find the regex example very confusing. It's certainly not suitable for obtaining anything except the second field, and requires that the second field be of a particular form. If you wanted all fields from a regex, you'd need something like: 
/([^!]*)!([^!]*)!([^!]*)!([^!]*)!([^!]*)/

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which is surely a lot less readable or maintainable than 
split /!/

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If you just want the numbers between INT= and the following !, you might do something more like: 
 
my $int = ($rec =~ /!INT=([0-9]+)!/);

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Note that doesn't guarantee that the value will come from the second field, but neither did your example. If you wanted to do that, you might use: 
 
my $int = ($rec =~ /^[^!]*!INT=([0-9]+)!/);

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One final note, you should be using print rather than printf in your examples.

In reply to Re: Simple RegEx Substring Extraction from a Delimited Text Record by duckyd
in thread Simple RegEx Substring Extraction from a Delimited Text Record by ozboomer

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