In a regex, whitespace is \s
An 's' matches the literal character 's'. so one way to do it would be:

($thing1, $thing2) = ($1, $2) if /^\s{9}(\S+)\s{10}(\S+)/;
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You need to include the things you're trying to capture, i.e. the (\S+)
\S means anything except whitespace.

BUT, this is much better suited to using split:\

($thing1, $thing2) = split;
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Now using split without any args is a special case that splits $_ on /\s+/
You should look into how split works, i think your post the other day would have worked better with split also.