while(<DATA>) {
    /(.*\.)?(\S+)/;
     print "$2\n";
}

__DATA__
2L
bar.2L
bar.ber.bir. 2L
bar.ber.bir.2L
[download]

works for me.

The above reads your request as "get the first substring part not containing whitespaces that follows the last dot char (if there is one) in the input string; otherwise, return the first substring part of the input string that doesn't contain whitespace".

Hope that helps.

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