.* is almost never useful in a well constructed regex. Instead use a character set restricted to just the allowed characters, or a negated character set that lists characters that are not allowed. In your case the closing ' character is a good candidate for a negated character set:

use strict; use warnings; my @grabArray; while (my $current_line = <DATA>) { next if $current_line !~ /Grab this\s+'([^']+)'/; push @grabArray, $1; } print join "\n", @grabArray; __DATA__ Grab this 'test1' (repeat/new) many lines Grab this 'test2' (repeat/new) many lines Grab this 'test3' (repeat/new)

Prints:

test1 test2 test3
Optimising for fewest key strokes only makes sense transmitting to Pluto or beyond

In reply to Re: How to get only the next word matching the regex in the line by GrandFather
in thread How to get only the next word matching the regex in the line by oysterperl

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.