One way to understand the result of the matching operation is to view it as a true/false value that indicates whether there is a match, and that's not what you wanted. To get what you want, do the following (you may have to further tweak your regexp, but that's a different story):

 $line =~/;(.*)\s-\s/; 
my $key = $1; 
 $line =~/\.\\(.*)-\d+\;/; 
my $value = $1;

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Peter (Guo) Pei

In reply to Re: Constructing a hash - why isn't my regex matching anything by PeterPeiGuo
in thread Constructing a hash - why isn't my regex matching anything by perl_mystery

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