Matching in Perl - perl

Question

I am trying to get text in between two dots of a line, but my program returns the entire line.
For example: I have text which looks like:
My sampledata 1,2 for perl .version 1_1.
I used the following match statement
$x =~ m/(\.)(.*)(\.)/;
My output for $x should be version 1_1, but I am getting the entire line as my match.

Answer 1

In your code, the value of $x will not change after the match.
When $x is successfully matched with m/(.)(.*)(.)/, your three capture groups will contain '.', 'version 1_1' and '.' respectively (in the order given). $2 will give you 'version 1_1'.
Considering that you might probably only want the part 'version 1_1', you need not capture the two dots. This code will give you the same result:
$x =~ m/\.(.*)\./;
print $1;

Answer 2

Try this:
my $str = "My sampledata 1,2 for perl .version 1_1.";
$str =~ /\.\K[^.]+(?=\.)/;
print $&;
The period must be escaped out of a character class.
\K resets all that has been matched before (you can replace it by a lookbehind (?<=\.))
[^.] means any character except a period.
For several results, you can do this:
my $str = "qwerty .target 1.target 2.target 3.";
my #matches = ($str =~ /\.\K[^.]+(?=\.)/g);
print join("\n", #matches);
If you don't want to use twice a period you can do this:
my $str = "qwerty .target 1.target 2.target 3.";
my #matches = ($str =~ /\.([^.]+)\./g);
print join("\n", #matches)."\n";

Answer 3

It should be simple enough to do something like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
my #tests = (
"test one. get some stuff. extra",
"stuff with only one dot.",
"another test line.capture this. whatever",
"last test . some data you want.",
"stuff with only no dots",
);
for my $test (#tests) {
# For this example, I skip $test if the match fails,
# otherwise, I move on do stuff with $want
next if $test !~ /\.(.*)\./;
my $want = $1;
print "got: $want\n";
}
Output
$ ./test.pl
got: get some stuff
got: capture this
got: some data you want