I think my original post was a bit too unclear.

I am looking for at most the first two words. So it may be zero, one or two.

I've modified his code to:

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]

which does exactly what I was looking for. I only tried to do it in one regexp.

Thanks, Marcel