Hmmmm....good point. Well, you can fix part of it with (?=.*\bfred\b (\w+)), but avoiding matching none of the targets is still a problem. The way I suggested will always get three matches because it says find "zero or more of this". That means either you can't actually find out how many non-empty matches you got, or you can only match when all the targets are present. Separate matches in a loop, as suggested by several others, is the way to go. Here's my take, redux:

$string = "This is bLarney rubble and his friends joe rockhead and fre
+d flintstone";
$count = 0;

for $target (qw(fred barney joe)) {
    if ( $string =~ /(?=.*\b$target (\w+))/i ) {
        push @elements, $1;
        $count++;
    }
    else {
        push @elements, ''; # as a placeholder
    }
}

if ($count >= 2) { print join('_', @elements), "_inc\n" }
else             { print "Didn't find at least 2 elements in the strin
+g\n" }

# prints flintstone__blockhead_inc
# change 'joe' to 'moe' and you get > Didn't find at least 2 elements 
+in the string

[download]

There ought to be something useful in there. :-)

--marmot

In reply to Re^3: Need a Regular Expression that tests for words in different order and captures the values found. by furry_marmot
in thread Need a Regular Expression that tests for words in different order and captures the values found. by greatwazzoo

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