Question: Capturing a repeated pattern

[robmderrick]

I think I need the big space of this over chatterbox to properly frame this question.

I have an input line that looks like:

somename   1000  0.24  280  2 2576.9  2731.9  12.0  4195.3

I am looking for a way to capture all nine elements with one pattern that allows me to use one subpattern to capture the the last 8 elements.

I.e, I tried this:

(@array) = $_ =~ /(^[a-z]\w*)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)/\s+([\.\d]+)\s*$/i

... but that is ungainly.

I lose a lot of it with the following:

my $p = qr/\s+([\.\d]+)/;
(@array) = $_ =~ /(^[a-z]\w*)$p$p$p$p$p$p$p$p$/io;

... but I would sure like to know if there is a way to use that one pattern 8 times, like repeating a digit match 8 times with \d{8}

Does such an arcane method exist?

-- rob derrick