thanks for your suggestion, wog. But I would like to know what I did wrong in my regex. When I tried to post my code, the 2 strings have been too long so I cut it down a little bit, including dummy characters after "HIT". Add a "-" or use the original definition 
my @strings = (
 '<a href="#1">--HIT-<b>MUST MATCH</b></a> <a href="#2">2</a>',
 '<a href="#1">--HIT-<a name="MUST NOT MATCH">--</a> <a href="#2">2</a
+>'
);

[download]
and the second string does not match anymore. Any help is greatly appreciated.

In reply to Re: Re: negative Lookahead by eddmund
in thread negative Lookahead or by eddmund

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