in reply to Backreferences in negated character classes

Is this what you want?

use strict; use warnings; my $string = 'ABCDEEFGHIJJJKLMNOOOOPQRSTUVWXXYZ'; print $1, "\n" while $string =~ m/(([\w])(?=\2).(?!\2).)/g;

Prints:

EEF JJK OOP XXY

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel