use strict and warnings. This will show you that your $birthdate variable is out of scope Why do you think there is a problem with your regex? 
use strict; 
use warnings; 

my $text = 'birthdate1234zodiac';
if ($text =~ /birthdate(.*?)zodiac/i) {
    my $birthdate = $1;
    print "$birthdate\n";
}

__END__

prints:
1234

[download]
If that's not the problem, then you should show us a small sample of your input file.

You would also benefit from running your code through perltidy and perlcritic.

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

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