Your question is a bit wide, as you don't tell us how your data is structured. I recommend http://www.activestate.com and their Komodo GUI, which has a regex explorer to become accustomed to regular expressions.

For the sake of the node, let's assume that your data is CSV data (see Text::xSV, also on CPAN), and that you don't want (for some obscure reason) to use Text::XSV.

What I'm going to do now is to construct a regular expression that skips n semicolons and then tries to match =nnn; :

  $line =~ m/(?:      # Collect heading fields
               [^;]+  # delimited by semicolons
               ;
             ){1}     # In your case, there is only one field before t
+he interesting field
             =        # followed by a "="
             (\d+)    # and followed by our numbers, stuff them into $
+1
             ;        # and delimited by another semicolon
            /x;
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Another good approach would have been to split() the line on ";" and then munge the second element of that list afterwards.

$variable =~ m/;=(\d+);/
print $1;  #holds 99 now.
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Hope this helps,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)
Update: chromatic pointed out to me that it would be good to make the remark that $1 is only set when the string matches. I totally agree with him.

I assume that you really want to match two digits.

$variable = "-----;=99;helloworld";

if ($variable =~ /(\d\d)/) {
  # $1 contains 99
}
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The parentheses in the regex mark the parts that you want to capture.

"Perl makes the fun jobs fun
and the boring jobs bearable" - me

# you have been shown this, but I have added another 2 digits
$variable = "-----;=99;helloworld88";
$variable =~ m/(\d\d)/;
print "$1\n";
# 99 -> *the first 2 digit string* in $variable will now be in $1
# Note match will stop with the first \d\d sequence looking L->R

# we can get all the \d\d sequences with this regex 
# the key is the /g at the end which stands for global
print "got a $1\n" while $variable =~ m/(\d\d)/g;

#Often we might then go on to assign $1 to a variable ie
my $number = $1;

#You can do this in on step with the expression
($number) = $variable =~ m/(\d\d)/;
print "\$number is $number\n";

# you can also capture the values of $1,$2,$3 all at once into a list
$record = "John Smith 919 909 900";
($first,$last,$phone) = $record =~ m/(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+([\d\s]+)/;
print"$first,$last,$phone\n";

# or an array
@stuff = $record =~ m/(\w+)\s+(\w+)\s+([\d\s]+)/;

# popped this in here for educational purposes
# $" is the output record seperator,default is one space
$" = ' : '; 
print "@stuff";

Hope this helps

tachyon
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/\d+(\d+\d+)\d+/ will store the 2nd and 3rd digits in $1 only on a 4 digit number. and if you are only dealing with 4 digit numbers then the regex can be more simply written as /\d(\d\d)\d/. the + sign refers to one or more occurrences of the preceding thing. what you will find is that if you have a number of more than 4 digits your regex will match the third-last and second-last. this is because perl's regexes are "greedy" so the first \d+ will suck up as many digits as it can before backtracking to allow the rest to match. again, this could be more simply written as /\d+(\d\d)\d/.

larryk $less->{'chars'} = `"time in the pub" | more`; # :-D

$variable =~ m/-----;=(99);helloworld/;
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-mark