Task — Find third

You are given a sentence and two words. Write a script to return all words in the given sentence that appear in sequence after the given two words.

Examples

Example 1
Input: $sentence = "Perl is a my favourite language but Python is my favourite too."
       $first = "my"
       $second = "favourite"
Output: ("language", "too")

Example 2
Input: $sentence = "Barbie is a beautiful doll also also a beautiful princess."
       $first = "a"
       $second = "beautiful"
Output: ("doll", "princess")


Example 3
Input: $sentence = "we will we will rock you rock you.",
       $first = "we"
       $second = "will"
Output: ("we", "rock")

Analysis

This is a simple case of matching the two words and then any third word, and doing so repeatedly.

My solution copes with punctuation and multiple spaces.

Try it 

#!/usr/bin/perl

# Blog: http://ccgi.campbellsmiths.force9.co.uk/challenge

use v5.26;    # The Weekly Challenge - 2025-03-31
use utf8;     # Week 315 - task 2 - Find third
use warnings; # Peter Campbell Smith
binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';
use Encode;

find_third(qq[Perl is my favourite language but Python is my favourite too.], 'my', 'favourite');
find_third(qq[I like honey, I like sugar, I like everything sweet!], 'I', 'like');
find_third(qq[I like honey, I like sugar, I like everything sweet!], 'everything', 'sweet');
find_third(qq[You  can   include ODD   SPACING], 'include', 'odd');

sub find_third {
    
    my ($sentence, $first, $second, $output);
    
    ($sentence, $first, $second) = @_;
    say qq[\nInput:  \$sentence = '$sentence',\n        \$first = '$first', \$second = '$second'];

    # match the two words and pick up the third
    $sentence =~ s|[^a-zA-Z]| |g;
    $output .= qq['$1', ] while $sentence =~ m|$first\s+$second\s+([a-z]+)|gi;
    
    say 'Output: ', ($output ? '(' . substr($output, 0, -2) . ')' : 'none');
}

Output

Input:  $sentence = 'Perl is my favourite language but Python is my favourite too.',
        $first = 'my', $second = 'favourite'
Output: ('language', 'too')

Input:  $sentence = 'I like honey, I like sugar, I like everything sweet!',
        $first = 'I', $second = 'like'
Output: ('honey', 'sugar', 'everything')

Input:  $sentence = 'I like honey, I like sugar, I like everything sweet!',
        $first = 'everything', $second = 'sweet'
Output: none

Input:  $sentence = 'You  can   include ODD   SPACING',
        $first = 'include', $second = 'odd'
Output: ('SPACING')