Re: How do I return the first n words of a string?

[runrig]

Here's a slightly tested solution:

my $str="hello there bob smith and more words";
my $num_words=5;
if (my ($words) = $str=~ /((?:\w+(?:\W+|$)){$num_words})/) {
 print $words;
}

If you want to separate the words you can of course:

@words = split /\W+/, $words;