while ( $string =~ m!(<a[^>]*>)(.+?</a[^>]*>)!ig )
{
      print "$1 \n";
      print "$2 \n";
}
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Thanks for that! I'm not that far beyond newbie myself :)

That does work, but it still fails to get anything but the first match even though I'm telling it to do it globally ( or at least I think I am ). That's the part that's still throwing me.

Some people fall from grace. I prefer a running start...

Did you try the using "while", as well? I've got this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

my $string = '<a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933900&method=full&siteid=5
+0144"> Costly false alarms </a> <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933890&m
+ethod=full&siteid=50144"> Mindless yobs terrorise OAPs </a> <a href="
+page.cfm?objectid=11933879&method=full&siteid=50144"> Road deaths </a
+> <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933842&method=full&siteid=50144"> Twis
+ted porn pervert caged for life </a> <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933
+800&method=full&siteid=50144"> Greenbelt homes plan appeal thrown out
+ </a>';

while ( $string =~ m!(<a[^>]*>)(.+?</a[^>]*>)!ig )
{
        print "1st match: $1 \n";
        print "2nd match: $2 \n\n";
}
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and when I run it, I get this:

1st match: <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933900&method=full&siteid=5014
+4">
2nd match:  Costly false alarms </a>

1st match: <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933890&method=full&siteid=5014
+4">
2nd match:  Mindless yobs terrorise OAPs </a>

1st match: <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933879&method=full&siteid=5014
+4">
2nd match:  Road deaths </a>

1st match: <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933842&method=full&siteid=5014
+4">
2nd match:  Twisted porn pervert caged for life </a>

1st match: <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933800&method=full&siteid=5014
+4">
2nd match:  Greenbelt homes plan appeal thrown out </a>
[download]

which I think is what you want. I first tried just doing a single "$string =~ m!(<a^>*>)(.+?</a^>*>)!ig" and then printing out $1, $2,...$8, and only got values for the first two. That "while" thing seems a little shady, for the reason I put in my updated post above, but it seems to work in this case.

What you're running into here is a matter of context. You're evaluating the regex in scalar context, which, when used with the /g modifier, performs a progressive match. This means that every time that regex is evaluated, it starts trying to match immediately after the previous. In other words, it keeps track of it's position in the string and starts where it left off.

One solution to this is to use a while loop to take advantage of the progressive matching (every time the /g regex is eval'd you get the next values for $1 and $2) as jmarshall99 did. The other is to evaluate your regex in list context to rip out all the matches at once.

my $string = '<a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933900&method=full&siteid=5
+0144"> Costly false alarms </a> <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933890&m
+ethod=full&siteid=50144"> Mindless yobs terrorise OAPs </a> <a href="
+page.cfm?objectid=11933879&method=full&siteid=50144"> Road deaths </a
+> <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933842&method=full&siteid=50144"> Twis
+ted porn pervert caged for life </a> <a href="page.cfm?objectid=11933
+800&method=full&siteid=50144"> Greenbelt homes plan appeal thrown out
+ </a>';

my @matches = $string =~ m!(<a[^>]*>)(.+?</a[^>]*>)!ig;

print "$_\n" foreach @matches;
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Or even using a hash (as long as your a tags don't repeat)...

my %matches = $string =~ m!(<a[^>]*>)(.+?</a[^>]*>)!ig;

foreach my $key (keys %matches) {

    print "$key\n";
    print "$matches{$key}\n\n";

}
[download]

-Bird

A different (and, I suspect, more efficient) way to handle this would be to use another negated character class instead of the non-greedy modifier:

while ( $string =~ m!(<a[^>]*>)([^<]+</a[^>]*>)!ig )
[download]

(Personally, I'd make that [^<]* instead of +, just in case you get data with links <right><up><against><each><other>, but that's your call.)

Not long ago, i asked a question about Text::Balanced, and recieved some really great help, even feedback from the author of the module....

here's a copy of my code snippet from that page, it looks for all of the 'substrings' that are wrapped in the 'tags' (which can be any arbitrary text, and need not be the same for beginning and ending tags) and strips them out....
this might be similar to what you're trying to do.

# find all the URLs from the page contents, rejecting any from bianca
@data = extract_multiple( $response->content, 
                [ sub {extract_tagged($_[0], 
                '<a href="http://', '</a>', 
                undef, 
                {reject => ['bianca.com']} ) } ], 
                                    undef, 1);

# loop thru and strip the URL to it's bare address, this is
# what's needed to insert into the database
for (my $i=0; $i<=$#data; $i++) {
    my @temp = extract_tagged($data[$i], '<a href="http://', '">', und
+ef, undef);
    $data[$i] = $temp[4];
}
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