I'm assuming you are going to read in the file and chomp the result, thus removing the newline from the end. You can also do similar things if you slurp the file, etc., but obviously the regex changes. Info can be found in perlretut. For this case, you can capture the last two entries in a tab-delimited record by anchoring to the end of the string ($) combined with using [^] to specify a character class (see Simple word matching), a la: 

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

my $string = "12\tWS:00001\tAny number of (\t.+)\tword_1\tword_2";
print join("\n", $string =~ /\t([^\t]*)\t([^\t]*)$/);

[download]

In reply to Re: regex question by kennethk
in thread regex question by Anonymous Monk

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.