G'day sp4rperl,

Welcome to the Monastery.

I see tybalt89 has provided a fix for your specific problem and Athanasius has provided an explanation of that fix along with some additional information.

As a general rule for matching between delimiters, consider simply finding the start delimiter and then matching everything which follows that isn't the end delimiter. So, your captures would look like ([^"]*). I find this:

• Makes it obvious what you want to capture (in this case, everything that isn't a double quote).
• Means you don't have to worry about greediness (i.e. adding the '?' after '.*').
• Avoids '.' not capturing a newline because an 's' modifier was forgotten (in fact, you haven't used an 's' modifier but your subsequent use of chomp suggests you thought you might capture a newline at the end). See perlre: Modifiers for more on this; also look at the 'm' modifier.

Here's some quick examples showing same/different delimiter pairs matching some/no enclosed text:

$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{" "}; q{a"b"c} =~ /$s([^$e]*)/; say "|$1|"
+'
|b|
$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{" "}; q{a""c} =~ /$s([^$e]*)/; say "|$1|"'
||
$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{< >}; q{a<b>c} =~ /$s([^$e]*)/; say "|$1|"
+'
|b|
$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{< >}; q{a<>c} =~ /$s([^$e]*)/; say "|$1|"'
||
[download]

Here's a few more examples, with embedded newlines, showing:

1. ([^"]*) capturing text as is.
2. (.*?) capturing nothing as is.
3. (.*?) capturing text when the 's' modifier is added.

$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{" "}; qq{a"b\n"c} =~ /$s([^$e]*)/; say "|$
+1|"'
|b
|
$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{" "}; qq{a"b\n"c} =~ /$s(.*?)$e/; say "|$1
+|"'
||
$ perl -E 'my ($s, $e) = qw{" "}; qq{a"b\n"c} =~ /$s(.*?)$e/s; say "|$
+1|"'
|b
|
[download]

When dealing with data where the enclosed text may include an escaped delimiter (e.g. "abc\"xyz") neither the (.*?) nor the ([^"]*) will work (for that example, both will capture 'abc\'). In these cases, you'll need a somewhat more complex regular expression: see perlre: Quantifiers and search for 'the typical "match a double-quoted string" problem'. [Note: You won't have this issue with HTML.]

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