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; [download]
Prints:
EEF JJK OOP XXY [download]