Extract first word after specific word

Very close:

my ($w_after) = ($words =~ /anywhere\s+(\S+)/);
   ^        ^                       ^^^
   +--------+                        |
     Note 1                        Note 2

Note 1: =~ returns a list of captured items, so the assignment target needs to be a list.

Note 2: allow one or more blanks after anywhere

First, you have to write parentheses around left side expression of = operator to force array context for regexp evaluation. See m// and // in perlop documentation.[1] You can write parentheses also around =~ binding operator to improve readability but it is not necessary because =~ has pretty high priority.

Use POSIX Character Classes word

my ($w_after) = ($words =~ / \b anywhere \W+ (\w+) \b /x);

Note I'm using x so whitespaces in regexp are ignored. Also use \b word boundary to anchor regexp correctly.

[1]: I write my ($w_after) just for convenience because you can write my ($a, $b, $c, @rest) as equivalent of (my $a, my $b, my $c, my @rest) but you can also control scope of your variables like (my $a, our $UGLY_GLOBAL, local $_, @_).

In Perl v5.22 and later, you can use \b{wb} to get better results for natural language. The pattern could be

/anywhere\b{wb}.+?\b{wb}(.+?\b{wb})/

"wb" stands for word break, and it will account for words that have apostrophes in them, like "I'll", that plain \b doesn't.

.+?\b{wb}

matches the shortest non-empty sequence of characters that don't have a word break in them. The first one matches the span of spaces in your sentence; and the second one matches "except". It is enclosed in parentheses, so upon completion $1 contains "except".

\b{wb} is documented most fully in perlrebackslash

This Regex to be matched:

my ($expect) = ($words=~m/anywhere\s+([^\s]+)\s+/);

^\s+ the word between two spaces

Thanks.

If you want to also take into consideration the punctuation marks, like in:

my $words = "Today i'm not going anywhere; except to office.";

Then try this:

my ($w_after) = ($words =~ /anywhere[[:punct:]|\s]+(\S+)/);