Corion's analysis is right. As a question, you may not even need to fiddle with the \n at all, by changing from \S to \w. a word char is 0-9A-Za-z_ and therefore \ won't match. Its not clear to me what all kind of characters could be in "theoneiwant" anyway if your data allows it something even simpler can be done...

for (<DATA>) {
   print "Matched: $1\n"
            if m/DIP\s+\S+\s+(\w+)/;     #([\w-]+) to allow -   
};
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