It looks like you have a string containg some words (or numbers) between "foo" and "bar". The words themselves are separated with spaces, so

   foo a b cd efg bar
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is what you want to search for, I assume.

The regular expression you mention expects "foo" and "bar" to occur more than once, so it might not be the regexp you are looking for. You could use two steps: first, find everything between "foo" and "bar", then split that into separate words or numbers. The code would then be:

   my @matches;
   if ($data =~ m/foo (.*) bar/) { # everything between foo and bar go
+es into $1
      @matches = split(' ', $1); # split on whitespace
   }
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I cannot think of a regexp that does it in one go, so I welcome smarter solutions.