flyganji:

You need to use a group in your regex to capture the match value, as described in perldoc perlre. For example:

use strict;
use warnings;
my $string='foo bar baz bow';
if ($string =~ /bar(.*)bow/) {
    print "between bar and bow is '$1'\n";
}
[download]

gives me:

$ perl x.pl
between bar and bow is ' baz '
[download]

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

Update: Added quotes in print statement to show that the whitespace is also captured.