Did you try it?

It prints the first 2 words as defined by the OP.

rnahi,
Yes I did - against the $msg in my post. The problem is my original understanding of the OP's requirements. I was thinking there would be multiple sentences in a given string and the first two words of each sentence was required. There has been clarification of the requirements and you are correct - sorry.

Cheers - L~R

my $firstWord = undef;
my $secondWord = undef;
my $i = 0;
while ($message =~ /([A-Za-z0-9]+)/g) {
    if ($i == 0) {
        $firstWord = $1;
    }
    elsif ($i == 1) {
        $secondWord = $1;
        last;
    }
    $i++;
}
[download]