I'm not sure if this is going to be of any use but you might be able to detect that the digits are at the end of the string rather than the 'b'. You could do this by making the match for 'b' conditional on whether you've got to the end so that the match doesn't actually fail if the 'b' isn't there. The code may do a better job of explaining what I mean.

#!/usr/bin/perl -l
#
use strict;
use warnings;

my @strings = qw{
   a123ga123b
   a123bdfda123
   a123effa123
   a123
   d663h
   };

my $len;
my $rsLen = \$len;

my $rxCondMatch = qr
   {(?x)
       a
       (\d+)
       (?{ print q{digits at end of string} if pos() == $$rsLen })
       (??{ if ( pos() != $$rsLen ) { q{b} } })
   };

foreach my $string ( @strings )
{
    $len = length $string;
    print $string;
    print q{Match} if $string =~ $rxCondMatch;
    print q{-} x 20;
}

[download]

Here's the output.

a123ga123b
Match
--------------------
a123bdfda123
Match
--------------------
a123effa123
digits at end of string
Match
--------------------
a123
digits at end of string
Match
--------------------
d663h
--------------------

[download]

I hope this can be of use to you.

Cheers,

JohnGG

Update: Corrected error in code, testing against $len instead of $$rsLen in (?{ ... }) block

In reply to Re: Did regex match fail because of "end of string"? by johngg
in thread Did regex match fail because of "end of string"? by moritz

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