foreach my $filename (sort keys %mycorpus) { my $titles = ''; my $counter = 0; while ($mycorpus{$filename} =~ /title:#(.*?)#\s*$/gm){ if($counter++){ last if $counter++; # skip the rest of the matches # can also be used to print warnings about multiple titles # and check $1 against $titles if they are the same, or not }else{ $titles = $1; # first match, we can store it, print "$titles \n"; # or print it out } } }