You're close. I added strict and warnings, moved the regex into a while loop, added the /g modifier to get all matches, and deleted $2 since you only have one set of capturing parentheses (see perlre). I didn't touch the regex itself, but please note that \w matches "word" characters (alphanumeric plus "_"). If this is sufficient, you could improve the readability of the regex by using it instead of the character classes.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $text = "test1 zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz test2 test3 test4 test5 zzzzzzzzzzzz
+zzz test6 test7 zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz test8 test9 test10";

while( $text =~ /([a-zA-Z0-9]+\s+[z]{15}\s+[a-z0-9]+)/g )
{
    print "string: " . $1 . "!\n";
}
[download]

Output:

string: test1 zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz test2!
string: test5 zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz test6!
string: test7 zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz test8!
[download]

---

---

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.