Thank you, i didnt understand that part about possessive matching and giving back.
to better explain, the html &#dd; encoding string should always terminate with the ; (as i understand it). I wanted to change any sequences of &#dd that did not terminate with the ; to &#dd. My next step was to run $content thru decode_entities from HTML::Entities then decode from JSON; seems decode_entities was ok with  and then decode gave me
JSON:invalid character encountered while parsing JSON string, at chara +cter offset 7279 (before "\x{22}
In reply to Re^2: RE greedyness
by huck
in thread RE greedyness
by huck
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