I think it is fine to have a bunch of small steps rather than a single super regex. One thing to consider is that these scraped webpage "fixer" regex'es need to be modified all the time. You'll come across more goofy stuff further down the road - so try to be flexible. Performance is usually not a factor at all.

My approach below. If split could work starting from right to left instead of the other way round, I'd use it! But alas it doesn't do that! Below I worked from right to left and used \S (non-space) and \s (space) Perl short-cuts. I think it is fine to use a combination of "fixing" and regex "splitting". In the case as explained so far, it is certainly possible to do everything in one regex. But, you've already seen the value in changing the tabs to | characters so that you can see them and print. Sometimes these intermediate steps work out to be real handy for debugging! 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my @tests = (
   'A ||118|AVIANN GILDED WILD HONEY. HM 75081701. 02-04-97',
   'A ||118|||AVIANN GILDED &^$WILD HONEY HP--09090901. 02-04-97',
);


foreach my $test (@tests)
{
   $test =~ s/^.*\|//; #remove beginning til last |
                    
   #"fix" possible typo in the registration number
   #  HP--09090901. becomes HP  09090901.  

   $test =~ s/(\w+)[-]+([\d.]+\s+\S+)$/$1 $2/; 
                             
   my ($name,$number,$date) = $test =~ m/^(.*)\s+(\S+\s+\S+)\s+(\S+)$/
+;
   $number =~s/\.$//;  #fix possible typo trailing '.'

   print "\n name=$name\n number=$number\n date=$date\n";
} 

__END__
name=AVIANN GILDED WILD HONEY.
number=HM 75081701
date=02-04-97

name=AVIANN GILDED &^$WILD HONEY
number=HP 09090901
date=02-04-97

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In reply to Re: regexp identify variable number of digits within a sentence by Marshall
in thread regexp identify variable number of digits within a sentence by bdalzell

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