Agreed. When working on code for heavy use, don't reinvent the wheel.

For learning purposes, though, you don't want (\w*) for the maximum number of consecutive word characters, you want (.*?) for the minimum number of characters followed by the closing quote.

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Actually, this is a good example of when .*? is not the best choice. [^"]* is a much better idea. You don't want to run into this problem:

    $page= '<a href="foo">...'
      . '<a href="bar" title="baz"><b>Click Here';
    $page =~ /<a href="(.*?)" title="(.*?)"><b>Click Here/i;
[download]

where $1 will contain 'foo">...<a href="bar'.
                - tye

Whups, didn't see the mandatory title="" in the match. Jumped the gun.

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