Maybe the following program helps you debug the regex:

#!perl -w
use strict;
# use Regexp::Debugger;

for my $line (<DATA>) {
    while ( $line=~/<a href=\"(.*?)\.htm\">/ig ) {
        print "$1\n";
    };
}

__DATA__
<a href="test1.htm"> test1</a><br> <a href="test2.htm"> test2</a><br><
+a href="test3.htm"> test3</a><br>
[download]

For me this outputs:

test1
test2
test3
[download]

okay, once again sorry I am really tired, I stripped my code with all unnecessary stuff and this is what I come up with, the result is very strange for me

$line='<p><a href="test1.htm"> test1</a><br> <a href="test2.htm"> test
+2</a><br> <a href="test3.htm"> test3</a><br> <a href="test4.htm"> tes
+t4</a><br>';

while ( $line=~/<a href=\"(.*?)\.htm\">/ig ) {
    $tmp=$1;

    print "LINE: $line\n";
    print "TMP: $tmp KK\n\n";

    $line=~s/<a href=\"$tmp.htm\">/<a href=\"\/xxx.html\">/i;
}
[download]

on the other hand Regexp::Debugger - amazing tool, thank you. It shows what the problem and it is what I suspected, but I have no idea why is it matching this way and I have no idea how to fix this. As you see in my code I have a s/ replace and after first replace the matching is weird

so on the second pass of while the regex is more or less like this:

$line='<p><a href="xxx.html"> test1</a><br> <a href="test2.htm"> test2
+</a><br> <a href="test3.htm"> test3</a><br> <a href="test4.htm"> test
+4</a><br>';

$line=~/<a href=\"(.*?)\.htm\">/ig;
$tmp=$1;

print "LINE: $line\n";
print "TMP: $tmp KK\n\n";
[download]

why is it matching: xxx.html"> test1
<a href="test2

and not "test2"? how do I make it match test2, thank you