Inside your if statement I would say: 
    my $area = $tmp;
    
    # anchor the pattern at the start of the line using ^
    # then look for the third clump of characters and pick everything 
+through up to the hyphen.
    # the ? turns off greedy matching, so you do not get messed up by 
+duplicate occurrences of -dpt on the same line.
 

    $area =~ s/^.*\s+.*\s+(.*?)-dpt/\1/;
    return $area;

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In reply to Re: Simple Regex Question by sierrathedog04
in thread Simple Regex Question by Anonymous Monk

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