in reply to regex minpulation

This seems to do what you want. I opted to split it out into two regexen for simplicity and readability.
while (<DATA>) { next if m/.*?<.*?>/; #skip if <> exist in view my ($view) = m/\(view: (.*?)\)/; #capture view text print $view, "\n"; } __DATA__ (view: <UUID:50156b3c>) (view: seerla_golden-dev_FGPCfeature) (view: seerla_golden-dev_FGPCfe)
Hope that helps a bit,
  dug