my @hrefs = qw( href="/something/something1/html" href="/abc.html" href="blah.html" href="/dir1/dir2/dir3/test" ); ## new arrray my @links = map /"(.*)"/, @hrefs; ## modify @hrefs s/href="(.*)"/$1/ for @hrefs; print "links - \n", map("\t$_\n", @links), $/; print "hrefs - \n", map("\t$_\n", @hrefs), $/; __output__ links - /something/something1/html /abc.html blah.html /dir1/dir2/dir3/test hrefs - /something/something1/html /abc.html blah.html /dir1/dir2/dir3/test