I'm going to assume that everything but the anglebrackets is reliably alphanumeric. I shoved $inputexample into $_ to unclutter the code. 
use strict;
use warnings;

my $templateformat = 'w<NM>b<NM>cm<CH>sw<SW>';
$_  = 'w8b8cm512swno';
my(@values, @names, $val);

# In the example, @h will be ('w', 'NM', 'b', 'NM', 'cm', 'CH', 'sw', 
+'SW')
my @h = $templateformat =~ /(\w+)<(\w+)>/g;

for (my $ix=0; $ix + 1 < @h; $ix += 2){
    push(@names, $h[$ix +1]);
    # Match up to the next piece of template
    if($ix + 2 < @h){
    ($val, $_) = /$h[$ix](.+)($h[$ix +2].+)/ or die 'bad middle'}
    # or match to the end if there's no next piece
    else{
    ($val) = /$h[$ix](.+)/ or die 'bad end'};
    push(@values, $val)};

local($,, $\ ) = ("\t", "\n");
print(@names);
print(@values);

[download]
gives
NM      NM      CH      SW
8       8       512     no

[download]
You might want to add more robust error-checking. I could have shoved the push into @values inside the if/else. I'd have saved creating the $val variable but I'd have duplicated the push.

throop

In reply to Re: text extraction question by throop
in thread text extraction question by echoangel911

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