Hi, in the absence of modules the following regexp seems to work. It will need changing if you're going to somehow allow literal *'s in the text, but I'd need to know how you intend to do this really before being able to do it.

Just for further information the secret is in the ? which forces minimal, ie. 'shortest possible', matching.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $text = "This is in *Bold* and so is *This*!";

$text =~ s/\*(.*?)\*/<em>$1<\/em>/g;

print $text;
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