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in reply to Re^2: match sequences of words based on number of characters
in thread match sequences of words based on number of characters

Based on the examples, I don't believe that nicemank is requiring captured words to be adjacent.

Hmmm... After taking another look at the OP, I think you may be right. In which case:

>perl -wMstrict -le "my $s = 'xxxx yy zzzzz xxxx qqq xxxx yy zzzzz xxxx qqq'; ;; for my $ar ([2, 4, 3], [5, 3]) { my $rx = rxg(@$ar); print $rx; my @groups = $s =~ m{ $rx }xmsg; print qq{'$_'} for @groups; } ;; sub rxg { my ($rx) = map qr{ \b $_ \b }xms, join ' \b .+? \b ', map qq{\\w{$_}}, @_ ; ;; return $rx; } " (?^msx: \b \w{2} \b .+? \b \w{4} \b .+? \b \w{3} \b ) 'yy zzzzz xxxx qqq' 'yy zzzzz xxxx qqq' (?^msx: \b \w{5} \b .+? \b \w{3} \b ) 'zzzzz xxxx qqq' 'zzzzz xxxx qqq'

Update: No, darn it, that's still not right! nicemank seems to want  'yy xxxx qqq' from  'yy zzzzz xxxx qqq'. Oh, well...

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Re^4: match sequences of words based on number of characters
by frozenwithjoy (Priest) on Feb 18, 2013 at 04:00 UTC
    I think that the sub I wrote below does the trick, but I only did limited testing on it.