Thanks again for the help! Here is some more detail. The input looks like this:

foo some string bar unneeded data foo another string bar data data foo
+     bar data data foo s   bar data foo string bar data data data foo
+    bar   data foo 123 string bar
[download]

What I wanted from this was @matches where:

$matches[0] = some string
$matches[1] = another string
$matches[2] =
$matches[3] = s
$matches[4] = string
$matches[5] =
$matches[6] = 123 string
[download]

I'm busy going through all the suggestions.

Thanks,
Smaug.