I guess the answer is to turn the substrings you are looking for into regular expressions that accommodate the presence of '-' and '.' between the letters. For example, 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

$str = "a[-\.]*?b[-\.]*?c";
$str2 = "zzzza---..bcddddd";
$str2 =~ /($str)/;
print $1,"\n";

[download]
The use of the grouped regexp between /.../ allows you to remember the substring that matched the regexp.

But i'm not sure with that,can you please give some idea or give me your script if it's possible.

In reply to Re^2: find the substring by roc
in thread find the substring by roc

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