While I entirely agree with davido's exhortation to use a proper parser for HTML, I will answer your question because it is (in this one instance) fairly trivial. The capture group does not match because you have used the asterisk as the quantifier after it. This matches zero or more instances, and zero is, of course, the shortest.

Here's your code with a few small tweaks and the key change of using the plus as the quantifier:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $line = '<div id="roguebin-response-35911" class="bin-response"></d
+iv>';

if ($line =~ /<div.+?(<\/div)+/)
{
    print "line matched\n";

    if (defined $1)
    {
        print "right after match, 1 is defined\n";
    }
}

[download]

Similarly you don't really need a quantifier at all here because there is only one closing div in the string and one is the default quantity of anything in a regex.

I've used print instead of printf because you are not doing any format conversion. I've removed some unnecessary brackets and have used single quotes to delimit the initial string so the internal double quotes no longer need escaping (and you aren't interpolating in this string either).

But seriously, use a parser.

🦛

In reply to Re: problem with optional capture group by hippo
in thread problem with optional capture group by Special_K

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