* is greedy - it matches as many characters as it can, but it can match none at all. In (\d+).*(\d*\d+) the \d* is redundant (the following \d+ matches at least 1 digit and as many as it may) and the .* before it matches as many charactes as it can including all except one digit (the \d+ grabs one digit). One way to fix the problem is:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $data = "Exlief 4    page : 1 /10";
my $match = qr/pag\w+\s*:\s*(\d+)[^\d]*(\d+)/;

print "Pages : $1 / $2\n" if $data =~ $match;

$data = "Exlief 4    page : 1 / 5";

print "Pages : $1 / $2\n" if $data =~ $match;
[download]

Prints:

Pages : 1 / 10
Pages : 1 / 5
[download]

Note that a precompiled regex is used to save retyping (perhaps differently) the regex and that the 'match any character' has been replaced by 'match any character except a digit' and that the redundant digit match has been removed.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.