Taking the poster's exact description, "I want to loop through these strings and find maximal sets of two or more of the capital letters that do not begin or end with L." I came up with this: 
my $string = '---LL--C----LCSH-------CSHL-------LCSLH-------LCCHLSHCL-
+---';
@patterns = $string =~ /([^-L][LCSH]*[^-L])/g;
print join ', ', @patterns;

[download]
The result is this:

CSH, CSH, CSLH, CCHLSHC

Is that what you were looking for?

--marmot

In reply to Re: Regexp: How to match in middle but not the ends? by furry_marmot
in thread Regexp: How to match in middle but not the ends? by cormanaz

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.