Regex Word Boundary in Perl not yield expected results - regex

Question

So I'm having an issue with pulling data from a string between 2 keywords. I understand that in regex I'm suppose to use the \b boundary tags and I've written the following for a test example, however it seems to only match the whole string instead of just the portion I want.
For example, the string: "here are more string words START OF INFORMATION SECTION some other stuff"
I am gathering text between "START" and "SECTION".
So I'm expecting "START OF INFORMATION SECTION", I believe.
This is the following snippet I have written in Perl specifically, but it doesn't yield the results I expected.
#!/usr/bin/perl
# This is perl 5, version 22, subversion 1 (v5.22.1) built for cygwin-thread-multi
use POSIX;
my $text = "here are more string words START OF INFORMATION SECTION some other stuff";
print "Original String: $text\n";
# this should provide me with the specific text between my two boundary words
$text =~ /\bSTART\b(.*?)\bSECTION\b/;
print "New String: $text\n";

Answer 1

Your code is simply testing whether the regex pattern matches the string, returning a true or false value to indicate whether there was a match. You discard that indicator
If there was a match then the strings captured using parentheses in the regex pattern will be assigned to the capture variables $1, $2 etc.
It's unclear what you need to do, but this program prints everything between START and SECTION: in this case OF INFORMATION
There's no need for use POSIX, but use strict and use warnings 'all' are essential
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings 'all';
my $text = "here are more string words START OF INFORMATION SECTION some other stuff";
print "Original String: $text\n";
if ( $text =~ /\bSTART\b(.*?)\bSECTION\b/ ) {
my $section = $1;
print "New String: $section\n";
}
output
Original String: here are more string words START OF INFORMATION SECTION some other stuff
New String: OF INFORMATION

Answer 2

You should use this
$text =~ /\b(START\b(.*?)\bSECTION)\b/;
print "New String: $1\n";
IDEONE DEMO
$1 is the first captured group.
As suggested by borodin
if ( $text =~ /\b(START\b(.*?)\bSECTION)\b/ ) {
my $tmp = $1;
print "New String: $tmp\n";
}

Answer 3

The match operator doesn't change the string it matches.
You can use either of the following to inspect the captured string:
if ( $text =~ /\bSTART\b(.*?)\bSECTION\b/ ) {
my $section = $1;
print "New String: $section\n";
}
or
if ( my ($section) = $text =~ /\bSTART\b(.*?)\bSECTION\b/ ) {
print "New String: $section\n";
}